


a promise of grace (under silver-grey skies)

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ahch-To, Ahch-To wants to eat you, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Calligraphy, Canon Compliant, Exile, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghosts, Islands, Isolation, Loneliness, Mythology References, Pining, Post-Canon, Recovery, Time Shenanigans, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, porgs, the Force wants to eat you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-18 10:01:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 47,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13679442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: After the war, he's shipped off to Ahch-To to live out his days in exile among the seabirds and the ghosts. Every six months, someone will visit and make sure he's still alive.At least, that's the plan.(Or: the war for Ben Solo's heart, featuring an immanent cosmic entity, an island where time is wonky, and a stubborn twentysomething from Jakku.)





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thewayofthetrashcompactor (BriarLily)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BriarLily/gifts).



> The prompts I was given were so much fun so I tried to work with a few of them - _'Kylo ends up on the Falcon (or Ahch-To) and the porgs decide they like him and his hair, much to Rey's amusement/frustration', 'Playing off Kylo Ben's calligraphy set, Rey finding out about his hobby and/or him teaching her (could be au too!)'_ and _'kylo/rey snarking at each other, angst that gets better, amnesia, happy ending!'_ I really hope this comes close to what you were hoping for, lovely!  <3
> 
> A hundred million kisses and thank-yous to the beta squad, [kimaracretak](http://kimaracretak.tumblr.com), [pythia](http://pythiaspeaks) and [thereminnsonata](http://thereminnsonata.tumblr.com), who slogged through this in realtime as it was spiralling out of my control and never once told me to rein it in, and are 100% the reason it's not a total disaster. Pile love on them!
> 
> Nb: the wonderful [lakerose](http://thelakerose.tumblr.com/) has started a recording of this fic and I'm absolutely ecstatic to be able to share it, listen [here](https://soundcloud.com/kate-bennett-424185210/a-promise-of-grace-under)!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when I drown in my fears, in the darkness of sorrow  
> there’s a promise of grace under silver grey skies  
> and I’m drying my tears in the blaze of the sunlight  
> a reverie sealed with a kiss
> 
> — Kamelot ft. Charlotte Wessels, 'Under Grey Skies'

Dusk. Thin reeds of light are creeping in around the door, the blacked-out viewports; anywhere the old day’s searching fingers can find to slip inside. Kylo is slumped over in the near-darkness, bleeding out and waiting for the end.

For the day to end, for the pain to end: for everything.

As with all promises, it keeps him waiting.

She doesn’t, though. Red bleeds across his eyelids as the room fills with light and it’s only for a second or two but it’s enough to blind him to the dark: he can make out nothing around him but the soft sound of footfalls across the floor—and, in the Force, the presence of another.

 _His_  other.

She is here with him, at the end of it all, just as he always knew she would be.

She moves to one knee before him. He can sense her: hear her breathing, feel her eyes on him in the dark.

An explosion of light beside his head makes Kylo flinch back, recoiling from the sudden burst of heat and sound as Rey ignites her saber and holds it up so she can see him.

The full extent of the damage pulls a muttered  _“shit”_  from her.

Her fingers wrap carefully around his ankle.

“Ben…”

He manages to raise his head enough to look her in the eye, losing his breath to the lucid intensity of their colour.

To the _dread_ he sees in her face.

He wants to ease it, to reassure her that he isn’t afraid: that this is what he wants.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he tells her quietly.

Does she understand? She is closer to him than anyone, knows him more intimately than any living soul. They’ve been so many things, over the years, but that hasn’t changed.

Maybe she does, or she doesn’t: it doesn’t matter. Rey nods, her hand moving from his ankle to rest on his knee.

“Okay. Okay, Ben. You don’t have to. The war is over. It’s done.”

Her voice sounds so far away now. The darkness gathers at the edges of his vision.

He’s dying, he thinks.

“Will you help me?” he asks, and he means _to die._ He needs her help now, to meet the end, because he realises abruptly that he isn’t brave enough to face it alone.

Her breath catches. Her fingers tighten on his knee. He looks up at her again and begs her with his eyes to understand, pleads through their connection with all the hopelessness and exhaustion inside him that she’ll give him this one last grace.

Her jaw moves like she’s biting down on an argument. Stubborn thing, even now. He’s always adored it about her.

“Yeah,” she says, “yeah, of course I will.”


	2. One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Nb: it keeps changing the title to 'prologue' for some reason but this is chapter one)

The thing is, you see, death would probably have been the kinder fate.

There are many who believe Kylo Ren’s deeds are enough to warrant a dozen life sentences. Justice in some systems would demand his head.

So when the sentence is passed, seven months after the war’s end, that it doesn’t begin and end with a bolt to the back of the neck is—to say the least— _unexpected_.

For his part, Ren must be one of the few people in the galaxy not keeping up with his own trial. None of those who ever held power in the First Order’s short-lived itinerant nation have been permitted into the Core since their defeat (and not out of fear for their safety, since the likelihood of their making it between the shuttle and the courts in one piece is acknowledged to be _slim)_ , but the man born Ben Organa Solo was not among those who were taken when the war ended. His capture came later, and alone.

(Capture or capitulation, depending on who you ask; the ones who saw it will tell you that there wasn’t much of a fight).

For the most part, he’s barely conscious of the goings-on in the base around him, never mind in a trial held several systems away. They severed his connection to the Force when they put him here and it wasn’t long before the fog descended, coming down to stifle his awareness of the world behind walls as high and dense as mountains. It hasn’t lifted since. ~~~~

Time slips through his fingers this way, whole spans of it lost to the night.

More of an eternal purplish half-dusk, really. There are no windows, wherever it is they’re keeping him—which isn’t quite a cell but isn’t much more, though it’s kinder by far than anything he could have hoped for as a prisoner of the Order. With no means by which he might keep count of the days, he’d have lost track of the weeks long ago if it weren’t for the girl.

Twice a day she comes to deliver his meals. He’s a little more alert in the beginning, notices things like her uniform (a mechanic’s overalls, shapeless and functional, swamping her diminutive frame) and the roughness of her hands and decides she probably isn’t mess staff. In all likelihood, they’ve stowed him on one of the more far-flung bases while the Republic gets around to the business of war trials and sentencings, somewhere so remote it’s not even on the map, and she’s just one of the few willing to breathe the same air has him for any length of time. Either that or she drew a very short straw indeed.

He gathers early on from the look in her dark eyes that she doesn’t fear him—not that there’s much left to fear, defeated and chained and stripped of his connection to the Force as he is, but he’s still a hulking brute of a man—but while she doesn’t hate him either, exactly, there are wells of grief and bitterness and resentment inside her that he can only begin to fathom.

Then the clouds roll in, and there’s no _fathoming_ anything.

-

By the time they come for him it’s been more than six months since the day he woke, sore and disorientated and alone, to find himself a prisoner.

The escort must have been on their way to fetch him before the verdict was even announced: there can’t be more than a standard day between the young woman tersely informing him of his fate and the door sliding open to a mob of booted feet outside. Ren is cuffed and dragged unceremoniously upright, and a voice flatly reads him the full terms of his sentence as he’s bundled out into the winding hallways of the base.

The fluorescent light strips sting his eyes after the close darkness of the detention block, and once they steer him outside Kylo has to shut them tight against the searing grey of the overcast sky. It unnerves him, so much open space; so many curious, accusing eyes on his bare face. He keeps his head down and lets them lead him over the tarmac—with his wrists in cuffs and his Force connection severed and who knows how many weapons trained on the base of his skull there isn’t much of a fight to be had, even if he could muster up the will to resist.

He doesn’t lift his head to see where they’re leading him, but he doesn’t need to. There’s only one ship that sounds and smells the way this one does, and he would know it blindfolded.

He shrinks from the memories, reaching for the fog to pull it close around his mind until it’s only the grip of the guards around his arms that keeps him standing. He doesn’t  _want_  to remember—doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to see, wants nothing more than to lean into oblivion and let it have him.

He’s shoved into a seat and strapped in, and now there are long minutes left to his own devices, staring down at the patchwork of rivets and welded spots on the floor while bodies pass nearby, flight-checks are completed, supplies are stored. Some make a clear effort to avoid him, their feet taking paths calculated to bring them no nearer than necessary to the prisoner lost in his own mind, but once or twice a pair of boots will come to stand before him and through the thick haze filling his head he gets the impression that someone’s watching him, trying to gather the courage to speak.

A hand reaches out—he stiffens from head to foot, curling in on himself as he waits for the blow to fall.

The hand pauses, considering, and after a long moment moves slowly to rest on his shoulder. There’s a soft pressure; something is said, but the words roll over him and now he’s alone again as the hand and footsteps fade away.

There are others near—he can feel them, but it’s like they’re standing on the other side of a pane of transparisteel, their presences shrouded.

In the corner of his eye, something glimmers blue.

The cuffs are removed as soon as the ship takes off: whoever’s piloting doesn’t deem him a threat, apparently. Their presence is familiar too, an elusive warmth pressing up against the barrier between him and the Force, but they keep their distance from him and Kylo doesn’t lift his head to investigate. His life is over, as he understands it: the faces, the Force signatures he remembers, no longer matter.

He wonders if they’ll restore his connection to the Force when they reach wherever it is he’s to spend the rest of his life.

Doubtful. Maybe this pilot doesn’t regard him as dangerous—or at least, they reckon themselves a match for him—but whoever’s been charged with keeping custody of him might feel differently. There aren’t enough trained Force-sensitives left in the galaxy to have found one brave or bored enough to be willing to watch over the Jedi Killer for the rest of his natural life.

Unless they’re just going to drop him off on some deserted rock and leave him to it, he considers numbly. It wouldn’t really matter much, then, whether he could reach the Force or not.

Maybe they’ll open the bay doors midway through the jump and shove him out into the void of hyperspace. It wouldn’t be  _killing_  him, per se. No one really knows what happens if the starlines take you: he might drift forever on that vast interstellar sea, scatter into atoms to disperse across the stars, floating through the endless night until the end of everything. He might fall into another galaxy altogether.

More likely, he’ll just suffocate.

It’s not so unappealing a thought.

-

He has no idea how long they spend in transit: he sleeps for most of the jump, keeping to the cramped darkness of the crew quarters for those hours he can’t help being conscious—which pass for the most part in a shapeless blur. The pilot, who turns out to have been the only other person on board, leaves him alone.

He registers the jolt of the ship dropping out of hyperspace as he’s shuffling along the corridor past the cockpit. He’s dimly aware of the sudden flood of white light through the cabin when they re-enter realspace, of the slight tremors rocking the hull as Rey guides them down into the blue.

(Of course it would be her, charged with delivering him to his fate. Who else?)

She keeps her eyes determinedly forward, so focussed on the minute ripples of the thermals nudging the ship he could almost believe she’s actually concentrating. As though this isn’t something she could do with her hands tied behind her back.

Those hands move surely and deftly over the console now, taking the ship down in a controlled descent through the atmosphere. His gaze lingers on the line of her shoulders as they fall toward the planet, and he wonders what she’s thinking. He hasn’t felt her in the bond in a long time, knows that he probably never will again and that he only has himself to blame for it. ~~~~

The ship jolts, suddenly, tipping forward as the viewport fills with dazzling silver and they’re soaring down over an ocean so vast it seems to cover the entire world, her silhouette framed by miles upon miles of endless glittering sea.

Fleetingly, he thinks that maybe she really is just planning on lowering the ramp and kicking him out into the waves.

He’d like to think if she were that set on killing him she wouldn’t have worked so stubbornly to keep him alive.

He moves forward into the cockpit. To Rey’s credit, the tension in her body doesn’t grow any more pronounced as he slides into the co-pilot’s seat.

Something about this world seems familiar, somehow, like he’s glimpsed it before in a half-forgotten dream.

“Where are we?”

The sound of his voice startles a blink from her. “Ahch-To,” she replies, a weight in her voice that he hasn’t heard in a long time. “That’s Nimue dead ahead.”

“Nimue?”

“The big island,” she tilts her chin towards the viewport, and beyond it the horizon, where the craggy outlines of a distant archipelago are rising up out of the sea.

As they get closer he begins to notice flashes of green and grey here and there, narrow spires and rocky outcroppings thrust up out of the ocean around its white-foaming shores.

The reason for its strange familiarity suddenly dawns on him.

_You imagine an ocean._

Not a dream; not a memory either.

“It’s here,” he blurts out.

_I see it—I see—_

“What?”

He gestures out of the viewport: “your island.”

Startled, Rey looks out again to where the horizon draws ever nearer. Something crosses her face, something Kylo can’t begin to decipher, and then her expression is shuttering off as she draws back into herself like she’s only just realised he’s there.

A few moments pass before she replies, her voice low and tired.

“It’s not mine.”

Oh, but it’ll always be hers, in his head. Since the moment he first trespassed into her lonely dreams he’s never been able to look at an ocean without thinking of her; they belong to her, now, all of them, all the waters of all the worlds bear her name— _Rey, Rey,_ inevitable as the tides of the Silver Sea, clear as the moon on the lakes of his mother’s mother’s home, _Rey, all these things I would’ve shared with you, all these things we could’ve done._ Her presence suffuses every memory: she haunts him through world’s she’s never even been, this girl with her dreams full of oceans, her eyes full of stars.

So this is the place they’ve chosen for him to live out the rest of his days. This is the place he will never leave.

“Home, sweet home,” he murmurs, more to himself than to her.

Rey’s hand curls into a fist on the console.

“Something like that,” she says.


	3. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw for mild suicidal ideation

Ahch-To was a fitting place of exile, and it’s a fitting place to hold a prisoner.

It’s a strange little planet, isolated in both time and space, pulled this way and that by the endless tug-of-war of the binary stars around which it orbits. It was chosen by the early Jedi not only because its presence in the Force is unmatched almost anywhere else in the known galaxy but also for the unpredictable eccentricity of its orbital path, situated as it is at the nexus of overlapping gravity fields—and for how difficult it is for even the most advanced astrogation droids to plot a course there safely.

It’s possible that nothing but the influence of the system’s suns and the fundamental laws of physics are to blame for that orbital eccentricity, and for the electromagnetic storms that have been known to wreak havoc on any ship attempting to travel to or from the planet. It’s possible—plausible, even—that it’s no more than the nearby activity of uncharted singularities that causes time itself to stretch and squeeze on this tiny water world, gravitational fluxes pulling at the thread that connects it to the wider galaxy until the planet itself seems to play tricks on unwary starfarers.

It’s possible, too, that it’s something more.

After all, Ahch-To resides deep in the Unknown Regions, hidden away in a corner of the galactic halo nearer to the fabled throneworld of the Eternal Empire than any charted sector of the universe. There are stories beyond counting of strange occurrences out in the unmapped regions of space; solar storms that rage for millennia, magnetic flares scrambling droid brains and sending navigational computers haywire, comms wiped out and black holes swallowing star systems whole—and stranger still, of unexplained transmissions picked up out of empty space; distorted maydays and the haunting calls of nameless creatures from out of the infinite night, ghost ships hailing unknown frequencies out there in the dark.

The First Order had made good use of the storied dangers in this part of the galaxy, concealing their numbers and their strength for decades behind an impenetrable labyrinth of magnetospheric squalls and gravity wells. They had learnt to survive out there in the unknown after fleeing the war’s dying days, making the perilous journey through that maze to seek refuge in the sightless dark until the day, far in the future, when they would return to the known galaxy to reclaim it once and for all for the Empire reborn.

Out there, among the stars, their dreams filled with wonders and horrors and the eerie singing cry of the void, they had waited for years for that day to come.

And amidst all of this, connected to the known regions of the galaxy by little more than the data stored in the  _Millennium Falcon’s_ nav systems, the insignificant ocean planet that is to be his new home.

-

He follows Rey down out of the  _Falcon_ , the two of them guiding the pallet of crates between them up what must be the longest flight of stairs in the western galaxy. In an effort to distract himself from how unfit he’s gotten since they locked him away, Kylo focusses on the backs of Rey’s legs; on the shift and flex of the muscles in her calves as she strides up the ancient stone steps with a tirelessness that would leave him envious—if there was room for a thing like envy in the fog filling his head, room for anything beyond the simple directive to follow where she leads.

 _Where she leads_  turns out to be a sheltered dip in the side of the island several hundred feet above sea level, where a dozen or so small stone huts cluster together in the shadow of the crag. Rey moves immediately towards one of the buildings, towing the pallet behind her.

Already her Force signature is blossoming out around them again now they’re out of range of the stifling field, her presence weaving seamlessly into the fabric of this place like she was born to it, like the island itself is welcoming her back. Her relief at being reconnected to its energy is writ plain on her face when she emerges from the hut and takes a few seconds to just stand with her eyes closed on the threshold, breathing in the clear air with a look on her face that’s almost rapturous as she tilts her head up into the sun.

Kylo watches the tension drain from her, an expression of such _peace_ coming over her that he feels a pang. Where has she been, that she greets the weak sunlight and chilly breeze of Nimue with more relief than a man who’s been held underground for half a year? What’ve the rebels—the  _Republic_ —had her doing, that she looks like this is the first breath of fresh air she’s had in ages?

It’s like she’s forgotten he’s even here.

Her eyes shoot open then dart across to him, and in that split second he watches her unguarded delight disappear behind a wall.

Something more reserved takes its place.

“Not so bad, is it?” she asks cautiously.

Kylo shakes his head. There are worse prisons, and he says as much.

He should, he knows, consider himself fortunate to have escaped the trial with his life—there are no doubt plenty of people who think him  _too_ fortunate—but all he can think of is how close he’d come to being free of it all, and how for whatever reason, Rey had denied him.

She shrugs, rolling her shoulders to loosen up her muscles. “A prison’s a prison.”

She would know better than most, Kylo supposes. There are still moments, here and there, when he’ll look at her and see the ghost of Jakku in her eyes.

The smallest courtesy he can give her is pretending he doesn’t.

“Now,” she says, eyeballing the pallet stacked with crates like it poses a personal challenge to her. “I know where everything is, so I’m gonna do this myself. You just…” she flaps her hand towards the village proper, “explore, or something. Introduce yourself to the nuns. Don’t fall over the edge.”

_Nuns?_

Bewildered, he leaves her to it. While Rey sets about stowing away the supplies they’ve brought, which are supposed to last him till the next drop in half a year’s time, Kylo wanders off along the clifftop to investigate the rest of the Jedi ruins. The village itself sits on a rocky shelf tucked back from the edge but as he follows the uneven trail beneath the shadow of the crags, he comes to a place where the cliffs jut precariously out over the sea. Leaning outwards a little, he can see where the slope descends all the way down to the rocky shore.

Just the sight of it makes his head swim unpleasantly so he ducks swiftly back onto solid ground, heading further along to where the path curves up towards the island’s heights.

There’s something strangely beautiful about Ahch-To’s utter remoteness, how wholly unconnected it feels to the rest of the galaxy. Once Rey’s gone, it will be hard to remember anything else exists out there beyond the blue.

This is where she’d come to, he knows: this wild place at the edge of the universe, cold and blustery and damp and luminous with the wellspring of the Force at its heart. This is where Skywalker had fled to nurse his shame. It’s where he’d hoped to be forgotten, to die alone.

It’s where his line will end.

The cliffs here are populated by strange little creatures; small, round things somewhere between birds and rodents nesting in groups on the grassy slopes of the island, chattering to one another like gossiping droids over the wind. Kylo hears them before he sees them, but it’s not until he gets closer that he realises he’s looking at the belligerent little puffballs he’d encounter every now and then when the Force brought him and Rey together, back during the early days of the war when the two of them were still stubbornly trying to convince themselves and each other that they stood without conflict at its opposite sides. That they were, despite the bond that they could neither deny nor silence, despite the  _other_ things that lingered in their hearts, at odds.

One of the little bird-things turns its wide dark eyes on him. Kylo glowers back at it.

“What are you, then?” he murmurs.

The animal opens its mouth, revealing a row of pin-sharp teeth as it lets loose a bizarre warbling shriek. _Charming._ Kylo shoves his hands in his pockets and stomps off along the path.

What had she called them, again? He frowns down at the little beasts as he walks, racking his muddled brain for the memory. Rey had introduced him to one of them, once, and he’d been curious to start with, until the truculent little thing promptly chomped down on his bare hand, leaving a dainty ring of pink indentations in the skin. They’d taken a rather dim view of each other from thereon out.

At the time Kylo had been so preoccupied trying to prise the miniature monster’s jaws from around his knuckles that he hadn’t thought to question how it could see and touch him through the bond that linked his mind with Rey’s. As he wanders past more and more of them, though, and feels their bright little spirits in the Force all around him, it occurs to him that they must be strongly attuned to it in their own way.

Maybe it’s only that they evolved on this world, where every stone and clod of earth and blade of grass is so fiercely and radiantly  _alive_  with the energy of the Force. Maybe everything on the island has become imbued with that power over the ages, all of Ahch-To’s indigenous species accruing a kind of Force strength—or at least a modicum of sensitivity to it. It’s not unheard-of, elsewhere in the galaxy.

True, the creatures don’t  _look_ particularly powerful—in fact they’re probably about the furthest thing from esoteric Kylo can possibly imagine, like no bird he’s ever seen in his life with their black, fishlike eyes and their mouths full of sharp little teeth, their roundish bodies capable of producing the most outlandish noises he’s ever heard, from a tremulous croon that’s almost tuneful to a cacophonous screech that echoes around the crags. They fly, too, though the stars only know how; their stubby wings are more like flippers than pinions geared towards long-term flight.

One of them hops out of its nest and starts approaching him.

Kylo stumbles past it, ignoring the little creature’s chirping as it follows him along the path.

He doesn’t get much further along the cliffside before he starts to hear a voice over the gales buffeting the island. At first he mistakes it for the call of a seabird, a sharp-edge cry almost lost in the bluster of the wind, but then it dies down long enough for him to hear  _his name_ being called.

Rey’s shouting for him, her voice gaining a strident edge as she tries to make herself heard over the elements. She’s not looking for him—her tone is too demanding for that, less  _where are you_ and more  _don’t make me come and find you_. She’s summoning him back to the village.

There’s something strangely  _wrong_ about the sound of a human voice here, under the ancient crags, among the ruins, like this place belongs to the ghosts and the Force and the seabirds and the past, and the two of them with their heavy footsteps and loud voices and living hearts are intruding on something that was content to have been forgotten.

Kylo lingers for a moment to watch the white-tipped waves crash in over the shore far below, the breakers lashing against the rocks like they’re trying to drag Nimue back beneath the sea.

Further out, the ocean is cast in silvers and greys by the pale weight of the overcast sky, but here under the overhanging shadow of the cliff it’s almost the colour of granite, of stormclouds, broiling up against the crags in sprays of white foam and salt.

As always, that quiet _what if_ begins to creep through the fog.

The cliffs aren’t smooth, but on this side of the island they’re almost vertiginous, nothing but a long drop and a very sudden stop among the rocks below.

The edge is so close.

What if he were to just—step over it?

Kylo steps toward the promontory, leaning over a little to look down at the rocks below. Not a pretty landing, maybe, but those waves would wash clean whatever mess he made in moments. She would never even know what had happened to him.

The only thing keeping that thought from gaining the strength that might move him to act on it is the torpor clinging to his mind. In this moment, walking up to the cliff’s edge and stepping off into the air would require a drive, an impulsion, an ability to do more than just stand and inhabit this tired sack of bones, that Kylo does not possess.

Instead, he turns back toward the path, and the sound of Rey calling his name.

As he follows the path back to the village he tells himself that he’s  _not_  walking faster than he perhaps would normally because hers is the last human voice he’ll hear for a very long time, hers the last familiar face he’ll see; that he isn’t faintly terrified of the idea that she might leave without a goodbye. Anxiety bubbles up in his chest, and by the time Kylo stumbles back into the circle of huts he’s managed to half-convince himself that she’s already gone.

-

Rey’s coming out of one of the huts when he returns, a thoughtful look on her face.

“That’s all your supplies away,” she says. “I inventoried them myself; there’s enough to last you the six months and more—should be enough to see you through twice that, just in case. There’s other stuff, necessities and whatnot, but I’ll let you look through when you want.”

He nods, already accepting of the fact that that probably won’t happen. If she’d sorted them herself, they’ll be organised in some sensible fashion according to desert scavenger logic, which would seem to have fared Rey well enough for the past couple of decades. There’s no need for him to go rummaging about.

There’s no  _point_.

“You’re not on your own here,” she’s saying. He thinks she might have said something else before that, but the walls are drawing close again and her voice sounds as though it’s coming from a great distance, the way it used to when the bond brought them together. Like even though she’s standing not three feet away from him, she’s further away than he’ll ever be able to reach. “There’s—things. People, I mean. They live here, and look after the place.” She ducks her head, her hair falling over her face. For a moment she looks almost embarrassed. “They don’t like humans much.”

Kylo thinks about asking, but the words don’t come quickly enough, lodged somewhere in the back of his throat where the fog starts to build.

Rey’s already moving on, brisk as ever. “Anyway…just so you know,” she shrugs, “they’re around here. They live down on the shore. And there’s all sorts of other creatures...porgs, thala-siren...you won’t be alone. Not totally.”

 _“Porgs,”_  he mutters under his breath, and she casts him a curious look. He grimaces. “I couldn’t remember their names. Those…things.”

“Oh. Right. Yeah. Watch out,” she attempts a weak smile, “I hear they bite.”

He doesn’t smile back.

Rey glances around like she’s looking for something. All of a sudden, she seems terribly anxious.

“There’s good fishing, too.”

That stumps him. Has he ever fished in his life? Does he even know how to? He’s never even picked up a pole.

There’s time to learn, he supposes. Decades and decades of it. If there’s one thing he has in abundance, now, it’s time.

The thought is exhausting.

“I don’t have to go back straight away,” she says, staring unwaveringly at something over his right shoulder. “I mean, I might stay. Just for a bit. Stretch my legs.”

He frowns.

“Why?”

Rey looks down at her feet, every inch of her radiating discomfort. “I just…don’t want to go near the ship, yet. Near that animal.” Her lip curls in disgust. “I need to work myself up to feeling like that again.”

He nods. He’d just as sooner never go near an ysalamir again in his life. Force willing, he won’t ever have to.

“Then stay.”

-

She ends up staying until dusk, helping him move some necessities into the hut they settle on to be his and then disappearing for close to an hour. She returns with half a dozen freshly-caught fish and proceeds to roast them over the firepit, hovering over them like she’s afraid they might burst into flame if she so much as turns her back.

She is, Kylo realises, procrastinating like she was born to it.

He’s content to let her. He has no wish to be left alone just yet, and apparently he isn’t the only one hanging onto the illusion that this is no more than a jaunt, a daytrip across the galaxy they’ll fly home from once the sun sets.

“I still don’t want to go back, just yet,” Rey admits as night begins to fall, staring darkly into the flames. “Going back means getting on that ship with  _that thing_ and not getting away from it until I get back to Coruscant. I don’t even know where they found it. I mean, who just  _happens_ to have an ysalamir lying around? And why? Just in case you happen to need a Force-neutralising field?”

“I imagine it wasn’t hard to rustle one up from somewhere, when they heard the Jedi Killer had surrendered,” Kylo remarks, only a little bit sourly.

“I don’t like it,” mutters Rey.

“Why did you agree to this mission, then?”

“Because I’m not in the habit of refusing an order.”

“I didn’t think you were a soldier,” he says quietly. “I didn’t think they  _ordered_ you anywhere.”

“I’m not,” she glares at him.  _Don’t pick a fight, not now,_ that look begs. It doesn’t usually dissuade him, but tonight he has no energy left for antagonising her—not when he doesn’t know when he’ll see her again. “And they don’t,” she continues quietly. “This was…a special case, I guess.”

“Hard to find someone else they’d trust not to keelhaul me in hyperspace, I imagine.”

“You imagine a lot.”

“I’m trying to make a habit of it, it doesn’t seem like there’s much else to do here.” At the sight of her frown, he continues, “apart from the fishing, of course.”

To his relief, it makes her smile, one elegant eyebrow arching. “Lord Ren, was that a joke?”

“I never joke,” he says stiffly, the twitch in the corner of his mouth proving him a liar. He’ll never admit it for as long as he lives—and even after, probably—but he’s always thought his title sounded especially pleasant in her mouth.

“Hmm,” she looks back at the fire. The flames dance in her glassy eyes, twin suns burning in the half-dark. “I could leave it here, I suppose.”

Kylo makes a face at the side of her head. “You leave it here, it’s going in the sea.”

She rolls her eyes. “They’re tree-dwellers, Ben, I don’t think they swim.”

“All the better.”

 _“Ben,_ ” the sound of Rey trying and failing to stifle her laughter is probably the second-best sound in the galaxy. “It’s not its fault. What if I put it on another island?”

“You can do what you like with it, so long as it’s nowhere near me.” He’s lucky that the Republic had only been able to get their hands on one of the creatures to provide the Force-nullifying bubble for his incarceration. In vast numbers, he’s read, ysalamiri can neutralise the Force for kilometres, but the one currently caged somewhere on the  _Falcon_ could—thankfully—only affect a fraction of that distance.

(Now that he thinks about it, he’s damned lucky they didn’t just dump him on Myrkr and have done with it.)

“I’m sure no one would object if you made a side-stop on your return journey,” he reasons, “just…gave the thing a nudge out of the bay doors mid-flight.”

It’s a half-hearted attempt to bait her more than anything, because there’s something bizarrely endearing about her outrage on the lizard’s behalf, but there’s a part of Kylo that will never forget the awful choking silence of being cut off from the Force, of being trapped within that sphere of  _nothing,_  and that part is only two-thirds teasing.

“You’re horrible.”

“Still, I’m sure you’ll miss me,” he manages to force his mouth to move in what he hopes is a smile, even though saying so has reminded him that she has to leave soon, and it’ll be upwards of half a year before they meet again.

Rey snorts. “Not likely. It’d take longer than six months for that.”

“Ouch.”

“Will it even be that long?” she glances up at him, something wary flitting over her face. “I mean…now that you’re not cut off from the Force.”

She’s looking up at him intently, a slow flush of delicate colour crawling across her cheeks visible even in the firelight, and he knows she’s thinking of the last time they saw each other before she came to the base to bring him here. Six months ago, give or take a few days.

Kylo turns away, looking down—looking anywhere but at her.

He can’t think of that night. He can’t,  _won’t,_  remember everything that was said, all the things that were laid to rest between them, because to think of those things would be to exhume them up out of the dark earth of the past where they belong—where they have, for very good reasons, been left.

Not that either of them have ever been particularly good at letting dead things lie. Habit, for her, he supposes, scavenger that she was, but it’s always tended to fall more along the lines of self-mortification for him.

“I don’t know,” he mutters at last. “And you shouldn’t—”

“I know,” she agrees quietly. “And I won’t.”

The past will always be a more effective cage than any prison ever could.

This is her chance to move on from it, too.

All Kylo wants now is to put his head down somewhere marginally horizontal and sleep for the next three days. Longer, if he can help it.

(The six months after that, if at all possible.)

He wonders if Rey was given any sedatives, just in case he put up a fight, and if she might be persuaded to part with them before she leaves.

Movement distracts him. Across the fire, she’s risen abruptly to her feet.

“Anyway, there’s a comm unit in one of the crates,” she says briskly, “for emergencies. I’d say do what you want with it, but they wouldn’t give me the frequency, so…yeah, it really is just for emergencies.”

Kylo ponders what kind of disasters they think he might befall out here that would drive him to calling for help.

(He wonders if they honestly think he believes someone will answer.)

“There’s probably something I need to read out, some kind of…official statement, to say this is when your sentence starts.” She sounds  _nervous._ Why does she sound nervous? “I don’t know. Whatever. I probably should’ve done it when we landed.” Slinging her satchel over her shoulder, Rey looks across at him like she’s coming to a decision about something, and then she firms her jaw and nods to herself.

“Six months,” she says, “I’ll see you then.”

Kylo nods, staring down at the stone between her feet. He wants to watch her go, but in this moment it would take too much willpower to lift his head.

Maybe he only imagines the softly-uttered  _take care_  that follows. It sounds like her voice; it  _feels_  like her, that way she has of stopping his heart with her quiet gestures of kindness, her endless capacity for goodness, but when he finally looks up, she’s not there.

He doesn’t see her take off. The minutes pass: there’s a distant dull roar from the base of the island and then the _Falcon's_ gliding out over the sea into the west, a streak of blue light like a meteor through the twilight. Kylo watches the old ship circle the island once, climbing into the upper atmosphere until it’s nothing but a sapphire glint on the edge of the sky, and then it’s gone—she’s gone, and already he can feel the threads of the Force winding around him, reaching up out of the island’s heart and crawling into the spaces she leaves behind.

Then he’s alone.


	4. Three

He’d imagined a place devoid of other human inhabitants to be  _quieter,_  somehow.

The distance between one island and other is wide; wide as the gulf between one person and another, wide as the gulf between life and death, which nothing may cross.

(Nothing living, anyway. Those who have gone into the Force may travel where they will.)

But the wind and tides, the waves and the birds and the frigid air—there’s nothing to stop them, and out in the bruise-coloured twilight they conspire together to drown out the thought or even the memory of the world beyond the sky, to fill the sleeper’s dreams with a tumult of sound and fury and darkness.

It’s too  _much_ after so many months of near-silence, locked away in that little room on the base, alone but for the young mechanic who’d made it her personal business to utter as few words as possible to him: too much, when for so long its low ceiling and featureless walls had been the very outer edges of his world. Here everything is so much  _bigger,_ wild and disordered and boundless, no limits but the far line of the horizon and the star-scattered sky overhead, and the sea, that great slumbering beast, the whispering sigh of the waves like an enormous pair of lungs out in the dark.

He’d chosen the warmest, most comfortable-looking hut to sleep in, but long after the suns have set he stays seated beside the dying fire listening to the sounds of the night all around, letting it flood over him until there’s nothing but the rush of the waves crashing against the rocks far below, the wind whistling through the caves and hollow spaces of the island, the occasional cry of seabirds, and Kylo, alone, adrift in the darkness.

It’s terrifying.

He doesn’t expect to sleep much the first evening, anticipates being up the whole night driving himself mad with his thoughts and the song of the ocean and the sheer  _size_ of the sky overhead, more than big enough to drown in. And yet, when he puts a thick stone wall between himself and the elements, the exhaustion wipes him out almost instantly, sending him sinking blissfully into the dark within minutes.

That first night, he doesn’t even dream.

-

For most of the second day he doesn’t do much more than wander aimlessly around the little cluster of buildings, stopping to rest for a spell whenever he meets the limits of his meagre energy stores.

Whatever it was they’d fed him while he was a prisoner seemed to have been calculated to nourish rather than invigorate him; to make him as docile as possible while still keeping him alive, and the effects of it linger in the fatigue weighing him down, the sluggishness slowing his mind to a crawl.

Though, honestly, it’s been like that for a while now. Kylo can’t remember the last time he felt  _alert,_ felt clear-minded and certain of what lay ahead.

He leans back, resting his head against the sun-warmed stone, and closes his eyes.

That isn’t true, not quite.

There’s one moment. One, in an entire lifetime of uncertainty and indecision, where all he’d felt was clarity.

-

It is not quite the hardest thing he has ever done, but it must come close.

 _Foolish child,_ Snoke’s scorn echoes in his head. He’s speaking to Rey, mocking her cruelly, but his words strike Kylo too and his throat fills with bile at the idea that he could have been so  _deceived_.

Can it be true, that the bond was his master’s work all along; that it was never more than another one of his games to test his apprentice and make an example of their enemies that Kylo will never forget?

Her cries are still ringing in his ears and it takes  _everything_ to hold himself back and wait for the moment—because there will be a moment, he can feel it in the Force, every instinct screaming  _wait, wait, hold on, hold on for just a little longer, and you will have your chance,_ and now here it is and he  _can’t_ slip up if he wants either of them to get out of this alive. And, gods, he wants it. Wants it for both of them; for the future that was promised.

Looking into Rey’s eyes, his resolve strengthens with the conviction that he cannot,  _will not_ be the one to snuff their light out. No matter what it costs, his will not be the hand that cuts her down, and his master is crowing for her life but in this moment there’s nothing, no force or power in the galaxy, that could make him take it.

She’s crying and he can’t tell if it’s from the pain Snoke had put her through or if she actually thinks he’s going to kill her; if it’s possible that she who has looked inside his mind and his heart and not flinched back from what she saw there can still believe him capable of hurting her.

But she  _must_ believe it _,_  and for precisely that reason: because Snoke has looked there too, and if this is to work then he can see nothing else.

 _My true enemy,_ Kylo gazes down into her eyes, tear-stained and filled with fear and fury and that obstinate, steadfast  _hope_.

He thinks of the way those eyes had shone when he told her that she wasn’t alone, of the way something hard and resolute formed there when she replied  _neither are you,_  and of how her hand had lifted up and reached out to him and the only reason Kylo hadn’t torn his glove pulling it off was that he couldn’t quite believe this was actually _happening_.

 _My enemy, mine._  The way she’d looked up at him in the hangar, wide-eyed and full of faith, come from across the galaxy to stand beside him in an act of  _choosing_ that renders him speechless—he looks at her now with that same tilt to her jaw as when she’d faced him from the interrogation chair, that same headstrong fire in her eyes, and thinks of how she’d seen a future for them both and was here to make it real.

To  _fight_ for it at his side.

She crossed the stars to stand beside him. How can she think for a second that that means nothing to him?

It takes everything to hold back from opening his mind to her and saying so because he can’t, he  _can’t_ let her in, no matter how he longs to; he can’t take the chance that Snoke will see him coming when this moment will never come again and so Kylo must let it tear at him, must let her believe for a few moments more that he can make any other choice—that he’s  _capable_ of choosing otherwise. Fighting to keep his face clear of anything but resolve, his mind projecting nothing but certainty fuelled by the desperation in her eyes, he’s never been pulled in so many ways and yet all of him, every fibre, every  _breath,_ is bent toward this one purpose: to do what must be done to keep her alive.

 _As if,_ he wants to tell her now.  _As if I could let you die._

-

He spends hours watching the clouds drift by overhead, trying in vain to count the islands in the archipelago from here. There can’t be more than a dozen but he keeps losing track, his eyes wandering to every spark of light out on the sea, his attention caught by the squawk of every passing bird.

When nightfall begins to creep down around the crags again, he heads inside to put his head down, hoping as he nestles into the folded-up blanket that serves as his pillow that he’ll sleep as dreamlessly as he did the night before.

Optimism has never suited him. The terrors return with a vengeance, worse than they have in months: his dreams are dark with the sound of screaming, of  _pleading,_ the stink of blood borne on a burning-hot salt wind as the peace of a snowy forest is ripped apart by a blaze of livid green light. Above, falling stars trail fire in their wake as they come crashing down to earth to tear through him like coals, and he can do nothing, paralysed by spears of icy lightning erupting from a withered hand, gripped by the darkness that chokes his mouth and nose with the reek of ash and smoke.

It’s small consolation that there’s no one around to hear him cry out as he bolts upright from the dream and all but hurls himself out the pallet, scrambling into the corner of the hut—where he remains, crouched in the dark, shaking and convulsing with the aftermath of the terror and the lingering spasms of imagined Force-lightning coursing through his system, his dead master’s laughter ringing in his ears.

-

When the first greyish fingers of morning light come prying around the edges of the doorway, Kylo drags himself out of bed and stumbles out to the firepit. There, he sits gazing out over the iron-grey ocean, still shivering with the occasional tremor as the aftermath of a shock twitches through his limbs.

He no longer remembers the first time he felt the lancinating burn of Force-lightning coursing through him: it wasn’t so long ago, probably, in the span of years, but his memories of the early days of his training under Snoke are blurred and patchy, subsumed beneath the long dark and the slow wear of time.

The pain, though—oh, he remembers the pain. He still carries it with him, sometimes feels the echo of it in his bones and joints. They’ve taken to aching when the cold sets in, dull twinges shooting through his limbs and making him set his teeth against the ache of old injuries.

(It had just been one more reason to loathe the  _Starkiller_ , as if he’d needed any further cause.)

Maybe those old wounds wouldn’t still bother him if he hadn’t been forced to resort to archaic treatments to tend to them, to let himself become a creature of scar tissue and phantom pain in the name of strengthening his ties to the dark side.

The old pain bleeds into the new, now: Kylo can barely turn his neck without his muscles screaming in protest after a night spent tensed up on the stone cot. His lower jaw aches with how hard he’d been grinding his teeth in his sleep, the inside of his gum stinging where he’d caught it between his canines. He can still taste iron when he prods it with his tongue.

The surface of the sea is still, today, dull and flat as durasteel, the other islands dark clumps scattered here and there across the horizon. He doesn’t know their names; doesn’t much care.

Far out, white seabirds—altogether more graceful and sleek than the round little things that inhabit Nimue—wheel and soar over the water, their bright bodies like comets arcing toward the slate-dark sea.

There must be shoals of fish out there where they’re diving: they stay focussed around the same area, scattering occasionally when the form of some enormous serpent breaches above the water. Kylo nearly topples sideways the first time he sees one. Then he thinks maybe he imagined it, that it’s been less than a day and already his mind’s conjuring monsters—Rey hadn’t mentioned gigantic sea-snakes, after all—until another one launches itself out of the waves and he gets a good look at the thing.

No, Rey definitely hadn’t mentioned  _those_.

He stays there for most of the morning, idly watching the other inhabitants of the island and its surrounding waters going about their lives, ignoring the cold bleeding into his bones until he’s shivering so hard his teeth chatter. He studies the feathered creatures—porgs, Rey had called them—that still don’t quite look like any species of bird he’s ever seen as they propel their ungainly little bodies around the cliffs. A couple dive down close as if to inspect this new presence on their island. Kylo ignores them.

When he gets cold enough that the sound of his jaws clacking together begins to drown out the porgs’ warbling, he goes inside to find a blanket and sit wrapped up in the doorway for a few more hours. He slips into a doze there, unwilling to return to the pallet and the dreams that haunt it.

He sleeps, again, and does the same thing again the next day.

-

It takes four days for him to remember to eat.

-

On the fifth, Kylo tells himself that it’s only because it’s hammering down with rain that he doesn’t leave the hut, opting instead to bundle himself up in his covers and sit in the doorway, looking out onto the downpour and the grey rainswept coast beyond, the cliffs that appear occasionally through the curtains of water making their way across the island. Everything else—the ocean, the horizon, the other islands—is lost in the clouds, hidden away behind the endless sheets of rain that fall and fall like another sea out of the sky.

-

Ten nights after Rey’s departure it grows so cold that Kylo has to explore the other huts for more blankets, which is when he discovers that she’d left him more supplies than he’d originally thought.

He had some concept of the size of the pallet they were hauling up the side of the island, but he’d been so lost in his own head he hadn’t noticed that on top of the rations, Rey had left him crates of warm clothes and shoes, blankets and tools; a little knife in a leather sheath and even a shaving kit.

He wonders if that was her doing, or his mother’s.

Deciding that he’ll heed Rey’s suggestion and investigate the full inventory in the morning, he’s on his way back to bed with a box of spare bedclothes when a glint of light catches the corner of his eye.

Firelight flickers in the narrow window of one of the huts further down the slope, a startling sign of life in a village that’s unoccupied but for him.

He’s not alone on this island, he knows that, but he very much  _is_ alone up here. The caretakers have their own village down by the shore and they’re always gone before dusk. So who—

Gripped by the strangest feeling, the tug of some invisible cord below his breastbone, Kylo lets the crate slip from his fingers to the ground. That  _tug_  pulls him down towards the hut and the dancing flames, merry and inviting in the frigid night, long fingers of golden light creeping around the curtain hanging over the doorway to reach out into the dark.

He can’t feel any other lifeforms but there’s _something_ on the other side of the threshold—a disturbance of some kind, a lingering echo in the Force. Cautiously, Kylo reaches for the curtain, lifting it aside to peer into the shadowed hut.

The air catches in his lungs.

The flames blazing merrily in the hearth cast a warm glow over the sparse interior, which looks much the same as all the other huts in the village—apart from the spectral shapes of two figures seated by the fire, reaching out towards each other through the darkness, their outstretched fingers meeting at the heart of that burning halo of light.

A woman wrapped in a blanket, the shadows dancing in her eyes.

A man, captured by the promise of her offered hand.

Kylo’s blood turns to ice.

He  _knows_ them.

He  _remembers._

At his hastily indrawn-breath the figures turn, the taller of the two first, and in the ghostly firelight Kylo sees his own eyes staring back at him.

No— _through_ him.

Cursing, he stumbles back out of the hut, scrambling back up the slope to put as much distance between them as he possibly can. When he reaches the fallen crate, he scoops it up and returns to his cell, building a nest out of the blankets and proceeding to fall facefirst into it.

It takes a long time for his heart to stop pounding.

His last conscious thought is that he was wrong to believe himself alone here.

The ghosts have been with him all along.

-

On what he thinks might be the twelfth day, he puts his head down at noon intending to nap for an hour or two and wakes in the small hours of the night to moonlight flooding in through the little window, bright enough that it could be day outside.

Disorientated, he shuffles out into the cold to relieve himself, pausing in surprise at how light it is, and the sight of the clear vault of stars overhead nearly stops his heart.

Force, there are so  _many_ of them, and they look so near—like if he were to just reach out a hand he could scoop a handful of silver dust out of the sky, part those shimmering veils with his fingers and touch eternity.

The night wind stirs his hair, sends a thrill of cold running through him.

It moves something inside him: it reminds him he is not quite dead, not yet.

-

The rising suns find Kylo roaming the island’s heights, having climbed the vertiginous steps in the darkness and found his way into the halls of the Jedi temple.

He’d always be up before daybreak, before—or at least, ship-time’s equivalent. His early mornings were spent training, usually, rousing mind and body before the day truly began, but in the past months he’s had no reason to rise so early: a prisoner in solitary confinement has nothing to do with those hours that might be more peacefully spent unconscious. Now that he has some small measure of freedom again, though, that inactivity has begun to chafe.

He’s not  _used_  to sitting still.

He climbs up the hill in the dark, tripping more than once along the way and earning himself scuffed knees and grazed palms when a misplaced step sends him stumbling. His hands sting, he’s torn through the knees of his pants and gotten dirt in the scrapes, but it’s an inconsequential pain—coupled with the ache in his calf and thigh muscles it goes some way to restoring a little bit of focus to his mind, pushing aside the worst of the fog that still clings stubbornly to his senses.

He’d thought it might pass once Rey took the ysalamir away with her. He’d blamed the inertia weighing him down (wishfully, maybe) on so long spent severed from the Force, never thinking to look beyond that unnatural state because what else could it be? Losing his connection to the Force had felt like losing a part of himself—like being blinded, like slowly suffocating as the air was siphoned from his lungs.

The Force moves through the air like a breath here, nothing but the sound of dripping water and the distant rush of the waves disturbing the perfect stillness of the night. It’s all around him now, the way it should be, and it still feels like his head is stuffed with cloth; like if he were to jreach out in any direction his hand would meet the walls of a cage.

Maybe it’s this place. This island, so strong in the Force, like nothing he’s ever felt before…it would be so easy to drown in it, to fall beneath the surface of those fathomless waters and sink into the darkness.

Down under the island, Kylo knows, he’ll find the source of that darkness. Rey had ventured into it. He remembers how shaken she’d been when she returned—and yet, how much steadier too. One day, he’ll follow her there.

Not yet.

It’s still mostly dark when he shuffles onto the little outcrop near the highest point on the island, and seats himself down there to watch the sunrise.

The light gathers slowly, the craggy shapes of the distant islands emerging one by one out of the sea. Far across the water, the greenish-blue haze at the world’s end shifts gradually to rose, a slow warmth bleeding across the sky until the line of the horizon begins to  _burn_ , the higher reaches of space turning a perfect clear blue as the first sun begins to rise over the ocean in a blaze of flame and gold.

Soon, the whole of the horizon is burnished with light like fire.

Kylo drags his fingers absentmindedly through the loose stones scattered by his knees.

To the north there are clouds in the distance; heavy, grey, brooding things that promise rain later on in the day, but for now the sky above him is clear, and the suns are rising.

-

It becomes a kind of ritual, after that. Every morning before dawn he makes the long climb up the steps to the temple, passing by the pool of the prime Jedi to sit out on the promontory and watch the suns rise over the sea. Sleep isn’t coming any easier; he’s still plagued by nightmares, still haunted through his dreams by flashes of the past, but maybe if he wears himself out enough during the day he can get a good night’s rest through sheer exhaustion.

It’s worth a shot, and what has he got to lose?

-

The suns are high in the sky on what might be the sixteenth day, struggling to fight their way through a thick band of pale clouds, when Kylo hikes over to the far side of the island to where the powerful tides that surge up through the archipelago have sculpted out a little cove there, a beach of silver-grey sand sheltered from the winds by the depth of the bay.

The only trees on Nimue are stunted, scrubby things, knotted bushes clinging to the windswept crags with a determination that’s almost impressive: it’s why all the buildings are stone, why the lanai caretakers use turves for their fires and bones for their tools. There must be more on the other islands, though, because as Kylo explores the beach he starts to come across scattered driftwood here and there—some no bigger than his forearm, others the size of X-wings dragged up out of the depths by the strength of the currents here.

A few of the skeletal salt-stripped branches are of more manageable size, though. Hefting one aloft, Kylo decides it wouldn’t make a bad training sword.

He briefly contemplates testing it out here on the beach, but he’s out of practice and spraining an ankle on the shifting sand isn’t exactly how he intends to go about getting back into some kind of routine.

Up near the summit of the island there’s a saddle-shaped area with a flat, grassy bottom. Once he’s made the trek up to it, Kylo marks himself a series of concentric circles in the earth with the sharper end of the driftwood stave, and, reaching for the Force, begins the old breathing exercises to centre himself within it.

The first set of forms he completes is meant to focus and ground; the second, which he falls into effortlessly after stumbling a little over the first, is choreographed to get the blood running. After that, warmed up and itching to  _move,_ Kylo conjures an opponent in his mind and launches into a brutal attack, the air whistling around his makeshift saber as he brings the full force of his strength and stamina against his imaginary foe.

Behind his closed eyes, the colours dance, the lightsaber in his enemy’s hands shifting with every blow—one minute it’s the crystalline blue of his grandfather’s blade, the next he parries the green sword that still haunts his nightmares. The weapon in his own grip shifts too, from a crackling scarlet, fiery and capricious as his long-gone crossguard saber, to a clear blue-white as soft and elusive as a half-forgotten dream, a shade his crystal has not been for many years.

Not till every muscle screams in protest and he’s gasping for breath does Kylo allow himself to fall to his knees, panting, coughing, his shoulders heaving with exertion.

Maybe— _maybe_ —he’s overdone it, for the first day’s real exercise in months, but the burn in his limbs and the sweat sliding down his back fills him with a satisfaction he hasn’t felt in a long time, the fatigue the first thing that’s felt  _right_ in so long. He gives himself a short time to get his breath back, and then rises to run through a set of cooldown forms, again and again until he’s limber and relaxed and utterly, breathlessly worn out.

He collapses into his cot as soon as he gets back, falling asleep with a ration bar clutched unopened in his hand.

-

The next two days are spent in varying degrees of agony, his entire body putting up a vigorous protest at his questionable decision to dive right back into training after more than half a year’s slacking off. His muscles  _ache,_ the burn in his arms and legs more of a punishment than satisfaction at this point. Yes, he’s definitely overdone it.

Slowly, he thinks. Little by little. Step by step. Building up his strength again shouldn’t take  _too_ long: he was incarcerated, not an invalid, but his stamina isn’t what it was. The first step, he decides, will be to sleep for another hour or two.

He chances a swim after midday, though he doesn’t do much more than float in the frigid waves gazing up at the overcast sky.

The distance between one island and another is great; great as the space between two stars, as the chasm between two hearts, as the span of night on this world out of time. The only way out of the night is through: on and on until the dark recedes and dawn’s first light touches the horizon.

Morning will come, as it always does, but the dark isn’t done with him yet.


	5. Four

The waters around Nimue glitter in the sun.

Rey brings the  _Falcon_  in over the south coast and it’s as if nothing has changed: the island remains, as it was the first time she saw it, as it was the day she left.

She hadn’t thought she would be back, then.

It still doesn’t quite feel real now.

-

“You don’t have to do this.”

“What?”

“You know what,” Finn leans against the side of the ramp, arms folded loosely across his chest. “Someone else can go.”

“Someone else doesn’t need to go,” Rey’s half-done packing the crates away in the  _Falcon’s_ cargo bay: she can be away within the hour if she’s quick about it. And if she can persuade Finn she’s not taking a risk.

(She is, but not the kind he thinks.)

 _“You_  don’t need to go.”

“I agreed to it,” she reminds him, sending another pallet up the gangway to where R2 waits to stow it.

“You agreed to do it once, and you did—you took him out there. That’s gotta be enough for them.” Finn looks away, firming his jaw as though he doesn’t like to talk about command like this, but his loyalty to their friendship won’t let him stay silent. “You don’t owe them any more than that Rey. You don’t owe  _him_ any more than that, not after everything you’ve done. You never owed him anything to begin with.”

_That’s not true._

“I know,” Rey looks up into those beloved eyes, warm and brown and full of concern. She wishes there was something more she could say to ease that worry, but it’s not like Finn’s being irrational—she can’t really blame him for worrying about her, or for wanting Kylo Ren chained to the inside of a sublight craft and aimed squarely at the other side of the Unknown Regions. She can’t blame him for wanting Kylo  _dead_.

She can’t even blame him for thinking her mad, for agreeing so readily to undertake these supply runs.

The only alternative he’d like even less would be if he had to do it himself—and yet, if Rey asked, if she gave the slightest sign that this arrangement made her unhappy, he’d do it. She knows he would.

He’d probably like Ahch-To, as well, if it weren’t for…

Well.  _If it weren’t for_.

“I probably won’t even see him,” she says instead, giving an indifferent shrug for good measure. “He’s probably still sulking because he didn’t get to die like he wanted to.” (Because she wouldn’t _let_ him die, but—technicalities.)

“Maybe a sea-serpent got him,” Finn mutters. “You said there were sea-serpents, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. I don’t think they eat darksiders though,” Rey grins.

“Maybe they got hungry.”

“Well, if they’re still hungry, they can have his supplies,” she finishes hauling the last of the crates up into the bay and dusts off her hands briskly. “Sure you don’t want to come with me?”

“Hah. No.” Finn pushes away from the gangway, smiling, “Rose might be dying to visit porg planet, but I’m good.”

“They’re just  _birds,_ Finn.”

“No, they’re  _weird_. Big dead eyes. I can deal with the bunch you brought back the first time, but there’s something not right about them.”

Snickering, Rey jumps down off the side of the ramp so R2-D2 can roll down past her. “Just be glad you’re not exiled to an island full of them.”

Finn squints. “You’re not trying to make me feel sorry for him, are you? Please don’t say you think that’ll work.”

“Actually, I thought you’d find it funny.”

He seems to contemplate that. “Well, if they eat Ren, I take back everything I ever said about them.”

Rey links her arm with his and lets him tow her away from the ship. “If I see him, I’ll tell him you said that.”

“Oh, by all means. If he gets eaten by porgs I’ve got a new favourite animal.”

-

He’s waiting for her at the top of the stone stairs.

Rey had left the ysalamir behind this time—she never wants to go near one of the things again, never wants to feel that awful sucking  _absence_ around and inside her as the Force itself is stolen away—so he’d probably felt her arrival on the planet, a disturbance in the atmosphere of his new world like a ripple in a tide pool.

Still, it’s a little surprising to see him there.

She realises, quite suddenly, that she hadn’t been entirely joking when she told Finn she thought it unlikely Ben would show himself to her.

She gets the impression he’s come from doing something else: there’s a long pale stave in his hand, and his face and hair are damp with sweat. His shirt seems mostly clean, though, so she assumes he’d thrown it on to come and meet her.

 _At least there’s that,_  she thinks, trying not to seem like she’s looking him over, trying not to notice that he’s doing exactly the same thing.

She hadn’t imagined he would look so... _different._

She hadn’t realised she’d learned his features well enough to notice all the little changes.

Some of them he almost suits. He’s far more tanned than she’d thought he would be (not that she’d thought about it at all, really, in those moments when her mind went to him it was to wonder if he was bearing up under the isolation alright; if he felt the loneliness as keenly as she had during her own years in solitude). It’s a tan that speaks to wind and salt as much as sunlight, to simply spending long days outdoors. His skin has lost a little of its softness, his chin dusted with stubble, his hair a little longer around his jaw.

The other changes Rey can perceive just from looking at him, she likes a lot less.

He’s  _thinner_. There’s a new hollowness to his features, a gauntness that doesn’t suit him. Her scar dips inward over his cheek now, curving just slightly under his cheekbone. It’s not as visible as it once was—she doesn’t think it’ll ever go away completely, but the unforgiving weather in this place will give him some new lines to join it in the years to come.

His eyes are shadowed, as much as they always were. He doesn’t look like he’s slept a night through in months.

Rey draws to a halt a few yards below him, looking up into his heavy gaze.

He watches her in turn, his broad shoulders tense, his free hand slowly curling and uncurling at his side.

Eventually he draws his lower lip between his teeth to wet it, swallows thickly.

“Rey.”

It’s less a greeting and more like he’s reminding himself of her name.

His voice comes out hoarse. She wonders how long it’s been since he last used it.

“Ben,” she lets a little smile cross her lips.

Despite everything, it’s not terrible to see him.

He doesn’t smile back, but after regarding her for another few moments turns to slowly walk back up the hill, his shoulders hunched like a wall between them as he leaves her where she stands.

Rey follows in silence, towing the pallet after her, an uneasy weight stealing its way into her heart.

-

When she comes back from stowing away the crates, she’s apparently been taking inventory of his stores too.

“Have you been eating more than you’re rationed for?” she asks, crouching down across the firepit from him. “Your supplies looked lower than I thought they should.”

Ben shakes his head, doesn’t look up from the bowl of ashes in front of them. “I don’t think I’ve even been eating every day.”

The corner of her mouth turns down in disapproval, but Rey nods: she hadn’t ever thought she might one day forget something like a meal but in the latter days of the war everything had been so  _hectic,_ sometimes it had just…passed her by.

She’s not exactly surprised, either, given the new shadows under Ben’s cheekbones.

“I have to remind myself, sometimes,” he continues unprompted. “It’s easy to forget.”

“Did you move some, then?”

“No?”

“Then how? Those stores were to last you a year.”

He glances up, finally, his brow faintly furrowing, “there’s plenty left.”

“To last you six months?”

“Three,” he corrects, the frown growing deeper. “And a bit.”

“What?”

“Three and a bit. It’s been nearly nine, now.”

“It’s been six,” Rey shakes her head. “Ben, I said I’d come every six months.”

Looking away again, he shrugs listlessly. “I assumed you were busy. I have enough, it didn’t matter.”

“No, I mean—it  _has_ been six months. I know it has.” She stares at him, utterly baffled. “Don’t you have a chrono?”

“It doesn’t work, but I mark the days. I counted more than two hundred.”

 _What?_ That can’t be right.

And then, with a sinking in her gut like her stomach’s turned to lead, Rey remembers.

_Ahch-To lies within the Unknown Regions. Its orbit is thought to bring it into the vicinity of an uncharted and unusually active singularity—so active, in fact, that it has been speculated to in fact be the work of two black holes. This gravitational interference affects certain phases of the planet’s orbital cycle, already erratic due to the twin stars it orbits, causing, in effect, time to move at a slower or more rapid pace depending on the time of year._

Rey had read those words in one of the history texts she’d liberated from the island, deciphered the unfamiliar hand with the kind of painstaking focus she normally reserved for taking apart machinery.

Five years, Luke had lived on this world, and it had made an old man of him.

“Force,” she whispers, “shit,  _shit,_ Ben, I’m sorry. I didn’t—we didn’t— _none_ of us thought. It was six months for me, but I never thought—” She lifts a hand to her mouth, pressing it to her lips.

He’s lucky he hadn’t gone through his stores at nearly the rate he should have, in that case. If she’d actually been  _late_ …

“Rey.” Her horror must be apparent on her face because now Ben’s leaning toward her, still frowning. “It’s fine. I have…come to appreciate the solitude. Don’t worry.”

“I need to speak to command about this,” she mutters, more to herself than to him.

“Why?” He scoffs. “Rey, I’m not leaving this world. It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes it does. What if you run out of supplies?”  _What if you get sick, what if—_

“I can fend for myself,” he says with a touch of acerbity, “I’m not entirely helpless.”

Rey shakes her head, something thick and hot building in the back of her throat. It feels like tears.

 _Alone. He’s been alone. For months—years—more than agreed._  Counting that cell they’d kept him in, stripped of the Force and almost all human company, it’s been over a year now. Only the first of many, and yet— _that wasn’t the deal. That wasn’t what was decided—_

“Rey,” Ben breaks through her spiralling panic again, his voice softer than before. “Stop, wherever your mind’s going...stop.”

He lifts a hand, as though he would reach out to her, but it’s been too long.

Nine months, give or take. It’s time enough to forget a thing like touch.

With a deep breath, Rey gathers herself together a little.

_While you’re here, be here. Scream later._

“Alright,” she exhales, meeting his eyes steadily. “Alright.”

He doesn’t bother to hide his relief. “Alright.”

Her knee bounces restlessly. She needs to do something. She can’t just  _sit_ here, knowing this, knowing the value of time in this place. Will it be the same, for her?

Will it always be like this?

Her eyes fall on the fishbone chime hanging in the window of a nearby hut at the same time as her stomach gives a pointed gurgle.

“You hungry?”

Ben looks a little startled at the question. After a moment’s consideration, he nods. “I could eat.”

“Good. You build the fire,” Rey rises to her feet and shrugs out of her flight jacket, already looking around for the fishing pole. “I’ll get us something for supper.”

-

“How long are you here for?”

The question comes just as Rey’s busy tearing off a chunk of meat with her teeth, so she answers by way of a shrug.

“Up to you,” she replies once her mouth’s empty. “I have a day, probably, till I’m expected back, but I didn’t know if you’d want company for even that long. I know it can get a bit—much, after so long on your own.”

“It’s fine,” Ben brushes off her concern. He’s seemed just the slightest bit lighter, somehow, since she came back from her fishing trip. Like he’s had the chance to reconcile himself a bit to the thought of no longer being alone here, and he’s remembering, moment by moment, what it’s like to have another person around. “Stay. And—I’m not on my own, entirely. The caretakers have made themselves known to me.”

“Oh,” Rey’s mouth twitches. “I’d better stay out of their way. They don’t really like me.”

The slightest smile plays across his lips. “I heard,” he says wryly.

“Oh,  _no.”_

“I’m afraid so.” He’d first encountered the beings that live by the seashore not long after he’d arrived here: they had introduced themselves, horribly early one morning, by rousing him with the sound of their unintelligible chatter outside his hut. He’d thought he was hallucinating until he staggered outside into the pre-dawn darkness and found a group of island natives dragging in a haul of shellfish, having harvested their traps from the shallows during the night.

Ben had turned promptly around and thrown himself back into bed, determined to chase down at least another hour’s sleep before he had to contemplate something like sentient interaction, but the caretakers hadn’t taken so passively to the existence of another ill-tempered human on their planet.

They had seen him around the island before, but they’d felt the volatility in the Force around him and left him to himself. This early-morning encounter was the closest they’d come to approaching him yet.

The group’s matriarch had taken one look at him and decided that perhaps there was something she could do with him: this human was big, and strong, and seemed to be possessed of remarkably little willpower. If he was going to clutter up their island with his strange moods and his even stranger habits, he could very well make himself useful.

Which is how he’d ended up helping them restore part of the steps that had eroded over time, heaving up new stones to replace the ones worn away by wear and weather.

At least, Ben thinks it’s how it happened. His memories still aren’t the clearest of those days.

The sore topic of Ahch-To’s previous human visitors had arisen on more than one occasion over the past months—mainly because the caretakers had been so relieved to be rid of them, and were justifiably wary when that same ship returned out of the sky to deliver  _another_ Force-sensitive humanoid to their home.

Once they were acquainted, Alcida-Auka had informed Ben in no uncertain terms that if he planned on causing the same chaos as his predecessors on Nimue, he could very well take himself elsewhere.

Ben had mumbled something about  _chaos_ being against the terms of his exile, and though the human and lanai could barely understand one another even hehadn’t missed the sour look in her blue eyes.

He’d kept quiet, after that.

-

The sunsets on this world last for hours, the two sister-stars marking a leisurely descent through the afternoon sky until the first touches the horizon and, all at once, the whole ocean catches alight in a rush of gold. Nightfall, by contrast, comes in a matter of moments, twilight enveloping the island like a living shroud.

Overhead, the stars begin to emerge out of the deepening blue.

Rey’s been living in cities for the past year, and opportunities to get out and explore the wilder parts of the galaxy have been few and far between. Finn has promised to come with her, but then he also wants to continue his work— _their_  work—and his single-mindedness is infectious, so it’s been far too long since she’s had a night sky above her like this.

The longer she looks the more stars she can see, until there’s an uncountable host of glimmering pinpricks winking out of the darkness that spans from the horizon to the cliffs above, and the night mightn’t look so different between one world and another but Rey doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to look up into the dark and  _not_ expect to see Jakku’s constellations watching over her, that clear silver map by which it’s possible to navigate your way across the sands.

In her months as a city girl she hasn’t forgotten what an unpolluted night sky looks like, but she had forgotten the winded, slightly breathless feeling that comes from looking up into it.

Gazing up into those stars, she should feel small, but with the Force at her fingertips all Rey feels is infinite.

“I missed the stars,” says Ben quietly, following her eyeline upwards, “when I was—wherever I was, before here.”

“Naalol,” she glances over at him. “I thought you knew?”

He gives an unconcerned shrug. “Maybe. I don’t think they ever told me. It didn’t exactly matter.” That Rey disagrees with that statement must be obvious, because he gives her one of his  _looks_ (the one that she’ll never tell dare him makes him look the very double of his mother). “It’s not like I ever saw the outside of those four walls.”

“Still…” it doesn’t sit right, with her—not his incarceration, which was her fault, nor even the exile, which is _also_ her fault, but the fact that he went for half a year ignorant of which planet he was even on. She feels vaguely disorientated—vaguely  _unmoored_ —just thinking about it.

In the desert, not knowing where you are means being  _lost,_ and being  _lost_ means being  _dead_.

Silence falls over them as the shadows thicken into night proper. Out over the ocean, the moon cuts a pale crescent out of the south-eastern sky, a ring of ice flaring out around it.

“Is there only one?” Rey asks suddenly.

“What?”

“Moon,” she jerks her chin towards it, and Ben looks up. “Is there only the one?”

She’d not had the time to study the heavens when she came here first, but given how many suns this system has, anything seems possible.

“Yeah. It’s called Arianrhod.” The moonlight casts a narrow swathe of silver across the side of his face turned away from the fire, a little softer than the flames. It smoothes away the scar she left there, darkens the shadows under his eyes until he’s more ghost than man, bleeding between the cracks left in this world by the Force.

“Oh,” she shakes her head to dislodge the image of Ben dissolving into thin air before her eyes. “What’s it mean?”

“I don’t know,” he turns back to the fire, and now he’s a creature of flesh and blood again—still too thin, and far too sad, but she’ll take what she can get from this place which offers so much and never reveals the price. “I think it’s from the lanai language,” he continues, “but so far I only know enough of that to determine that they think very little of humans.”

Rey smiles. She’d gathered as much herself, without knowing a word of it. “Where did you find it?”

“The name? I found a chart—a box full of them—over in the big hut. One of them covered the whole hemisphere.”

“Huh.”

“It’s so old as to be mostly illegible, but I could make out the name of the moon, and the suns.” He gestures vaguely to the west, where the two stars have long since sunk. “They’re called Argante and Niniane.”

Rey tests the names on her tongue, finds them pleasant.

“There’s not a great deal to do here in the evenings,” Ben admits, “I’ve been coming up with constellations, to fill in the gaps in the charts.”

He looks up again at the sound of her snort.

“It’s funny,” she says softly, staring into the flames. “I used to do that too. Sit out while the sun set, before it got too cold, and find patterns in the sky. I’d make trails from star to star and imagine that if I got the right pattern I—” Rey trails off, her eyes darting up to see if he’s noticed. He’s watching her, listening, but if he realises that she’s just stopped mid-sentence he gives no sign. “I’d come up with all sorts of names for them.”

He tilts his head to one side slightly, encouraging.

“There were ones that everyone knew, in our part of the world—we used them to navigate by if we were out late in the Badlands. There was the Vworkka, and the Hutt, the Wailing Woman and the Stylite…but I came up with a few of my own.” Rey gives a private little smile, a secret shared with her own girlhood. “There was a group of stars that made this sort of, rotund shape,” she sketches it out of the air with her hands. “I called it the Crolute, after Unkar. Then there was the Bloggin. In winter there was the Gnaw-jaw, but I called it the Y-Wing.” She snorts again. “Like you said: not much to do at night.”

When she looks up, Ben’s face has gone tight.

“Unkar,” he breathes out the name like an oath. “The slaver.”

The bitterness twisting his face all of a sudden confounds Rey. “Junkboss.”

He gives her another  _look_. “Are we splitting hairs over the kind of monster he is?” he asks, voice cold, and it makes her sit up a little straighter.

 _I called you a monster, once,_  she thinks, taking in his unexpected shift in mood. She’d been wrong, maybe, or maybe she hadn’t—maybe she’d just learned to know the monster.

Maybe a monster is only what you  _don’t_ know, and that’s why a part of her wants to say  _Unkar wasn’t a monster. He was just what everything on Jakku was. Hard. Greedy. Cruel._

And— _I wasn’t a slave. I could go where I wanted._

So long as she never left the planet. So long as she gave her dues, and worked every hour the sun sent.

Rey bites her lip, hoping the night masks the tears gathering in her eyes.

“What happened to him?” Ben’s features have grown dark with a familiar shadow, an unkind glint in his eye.

She draws in a deep, careful breath. “Part of me hopes he’s dead. But he’s probably still there, still running the place.” A hard smile curves her mouth. “I took the  _Falcon_  from right under his nose. He wasn’t happy about that.”

He frowns. “How did it even get to be there?”

As long as she lives, she’ll never fully grasp the marvel of it. “It was stolen, and then it was stolen again, and again, and then it wound up at Niima. Where I stole it,” Rey can’t help grinning now, “and ran right into…”

Her smile fades. For a long moment, they only look at each other, and Rey thinks she’s never seen a person quite so wretched in all her life.

They’ve spoken so little of him, Han, the first ghost of many they share. It’s not a bridge either of them has been willing to cross, in all these years. Maybe they’re both unwilling, afraid, but the truth is there’s not much left to be said.

“He wouldn’t have sat still for a moment, if that thing was missing,” Ben says quietly. “He wouldn’t have stopped looking for it.”

“How d’you know it was the ship he was looking for?” she asks, and regrets it immediately when he looks stricken. It’s not enough to make her bite her tongue, though. “He came for you, not me.”

Ben’s eyes shine in the dark. His throat bobs thickly, but the grief will not be silenced.

“I know,” he says.

-

The sea is  _right there_ on her doorstep when she leaves the ship next morning, so it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to go swimming.

The desire lasts until her feet hit the water.

-

He’s giving his best attempt at breakfast when Rey eventually makes her way up to the village, her damp hair tied up in a loose knot and a thick shawl draped around her shoulders. She grunts a greeting in his direction and disappears into his hut, emerging a few seconds later with another blanket wrapped around her—a blanket it takes Kylo far too long to recognise as the one from his bed.

There’s a peculiar tugging intimacy to the sight of her enveloped in his bedclothes. It takes him back to a night long ago, on this very island, when he had found her huddled by the fire and nearly catatonic with cold and the things she’d seen.

She had been much sadder, then. Much less sure in herself and who she was, in who she would become, and it hadn’t been the first time Kylo had felt the impulse to reach out to her but it had been the first time he’d been unable to stop himself.

“Don’t say a word,” she warns him, lowering herself to sit on the stone shelf around the firepit.

“Alright,” he agrees, turning back to the bench. Then, because he can’t resist, “what was I going to say?”

He can  _feel_ the glare she directs at the back of his head for that.

“I tried swimming at dawn, once,” he says, poking at the brick of noodles softening in the pot before him. “Once.”

“Too cold for you, was it?” Rey mutters, and Kylo can hear her trying to control the trembling of her jaw long enough to speak, but he only smirks over his shoulder at her. She scowls right back at him. “Ass.”

“It warms up, a little, by the end of the day. Though I’d never call it  _warm_.”

“I gathered.”

“There’s more blankets,” he gestures with his free hand toward the hut he sleeps in. “In there. The fire could do with building up, too.”

“I’m fine,” she’s moved to perch closer to the fire now, tugging her hair out of its ties to let it dry in the heat. Their eyes meet fleetingly as she tilts her head nearer the flames and that funny feeling that had blossomed in his gut upon seeing her wrapped in his blanket gets  _infinitely_  worse at the sight of her long, elegant neck exposed, sun-browned skin turned to gold by the fire as she finger-combs out her chestnut hair.

He’s never been more grateful for the timely interruption of the porgs.

A sudden low chirping draws his attention away from the perilous ground of Rey’s neck to where, a few yards away, a couple of them have come to loiter in search of food, apparently having caught wind of the remains of the humans’ meal from last night—or rather, the parts of the fish that hadn’t made it into their supper. Even as he watches one begins to sidle over to the bench, a distinctly hungry gleam in its black eyes.

“You’ve made a friend,” Rey observes from behind him.

With one hand, Ben tips the bowl of heads and tails over so that the contents slap out over the stone below the bench. Rey wrinkles her nose, watching in curious delight as the bolder porg waddles closer and makes a calculated dive for one of the fish-heads.

They were never the most fearful of creatures, but now that they’ve gotten used to this strange hulking man living on their island the familiarity has made them downright audacious.

Rey levers herself upright and shuffles over to scoop up some fish guts between finger and thumb and extend it towards the foremost porg. It sniffs her fingers, then looks up at her expectantly, its mouth hanging open in a clear demand.

She laughs softly. “Lazybones,” she chides, obediently dropping the fish into that little gaping maw. “They’ll have you domesticated before too long.”

“It’s just survival,” Ben quirks a smile down at her. She’s pulled more of them out of him in one morning than he thinks the past eight months have, and it shouldn’t surprise him that  _Rey_  compels such openness from him when she’s been so far inside him he’s never quite gotten her out: it’s nothing, now, to let her back in. “I feed them so they don’t eat me in my sleep, that’s all.”

(Well, thinks Rey: there goes any chance of Finn ever coming round to them.)

-

A day is too short a time to spend here, now that the suns are out and they’re surrounded on all sides by a sea and sky of clear unbroken blue, and Ben seems perfectly content to have company—more than content, he’s  _eager_ , scarcely able to let her out of his sight as she meanders around the village.

Eventually, Rey gives up altogether on trying to explore on her own, and resigns herself to following him through his own daily routine—because, to her relief, she discovers that he  _has_ one.

She isn’t sure what she’d expected from the way he’d looked when she first saw him again: maybe that he spends his days wandering the crags, that he’s already gone as native as his uncle had when she’d found him. But Ben tells her that he’s been rising early and watching the dawns up in the temple—which she’ll have to do, one day, he says with a faint glint of humour, unless she plans on any more sunrise swims.

After breakfast he walks down to the beach and jogs until he’s worked up a sweat, then hikes up to the saddle to run through his saber forms until he can scarcely lift the stave. Usually there’s a nap involved sometime around here, and more often than not a bath.

The caretakers have been bullying him into doing their heavy lifting, since apparently they’re neither afraid of nor intimidated by him (Rey understands this to mean that he hasn’t  _chosen_ to be frightening or intimidating around them, and possibly he gets more out of being useful than he lets himself believe).

He’s been staving off the boredom by trying to restore his star-charts with a crude ink made of charcoal and fish-oil. He shrugs when he tells her, as though he thinks she might mock him for it, and repeats— _there’s not much to do around here._

Rey has no intention of mocking, not now she’s begun to perceive the changes beneath the superficial.

The old knots of scar tissue that make up his Force signature are beginning to loosen and unravel, ancient wounds pulling open beneath the pressure the island exerts—nothing hidden may stay that way, what is fractured must shatter and what is hurt must heal, this is a place of breaking and remaking and maybe that’s why it feels so  _eternal;_ why time and tide cannot disturb its rhythms. Nothing stays the same on Ahch-To but nothing changes either: it will always be this way, because it has always  _been_ this way.

Ben is finding his way toward balance, one day at a time, though it’s not a smooth road—he haunts the temple of the light but he has yet to follow the path she took down under the island. He’s not ready, he says simply. There’s too much in the way, too much breaking to be done before the remaking can begin. But one day he will. One day he’ll be as brave as her.

 _I’m not brave,_ Rey thinks,  _I’m too afraid to stay for long, in case time’s left me behind here with you._

_I’m too afraid to chance it, in case they don’t let me come back._

-

Too soon, though, she’s leaving: the day wears on and then before she knows it he’s walking with her down to the  _Falcon_  and hovering a little ways away from it while she lowers the ramp.

She gives him as long as she can, pretends to scan the exterior for damage even though she knows fine well the old girl’s in as fine a shape as she’s ever been, but when Rey turns back to Ben he’s still frozen at the bottom of the gangway, gazing up into the hold with stricken eyes, memory and grief raw on his face.

His features shutter closed as soon as he notices her looking but that face has never been able to hide a thing and—well, she’s in his head, isn’t she?

She used to be. The bond has been quiet for months, now.

A tremor runs through him when Rey steps close—close as she dares, anyway, which isn’t perhaps as close as she once did, because things aren’t the same as they were then. She isn’t afraid of him, by any means, can’t remember the last time she ever was, but she’s seen that skittishness in so many creatures—that wary kind of distance around others. Before yesterday his only company have been the caretakers: Ben hasn’t spoken or interacted with another human in close to nine months, and before that—

Before that, he was still alone, in different ways. It shouldn’t surprise her that though he holds himself still and steady beside her, refusing to give in to the nerves, his eyes are a just a little wild with the thought of unfamiliar touch.

She wants to reach out, or something—not necessarily to touch him, just to make the space between them a little smaller. Words have never been her strong suit: she’s a creature of action, of  _will,_ but her will is the only thing keeping her from extending a hand to him now.

“I’ll be back,” she tells him, “six months. I’ll be on time. I promise.”  _I’ll come earlier, I’ll do whatever I have to._

“I believe you,” Ben says solemnly.

Rey looks out over the ocean one last time, breathing in the brisk afternoon air. It fills her lungs the way the stuffy recycled air aboard ship never can, clearing her mind with the salt-laced freshness of the argent sea.

“Six months,” she repeats, then turns a faint smile on him. “Don’t eat too much.”

He still can’t manage more than a twitch in response. “I’ll try.”

His hand twitches, as though he’s thinking about reaching out too, but it passes in a moment and then there’s nothing left to be said, and nothing left to be done but walk up the ramp and close it behind her.

Then the  _Falcon_  is rising into the air, and soaring out over the water, and Ben watches as she disappears into the blue.


	6. Five

The night after Rey’s departure is like his first night here all over again. She was on the island for a little more than a day and still, somehow, she  _changed_  something: she made the place seem warmer; livelier, a little less like a dream from which he hasn’t yet figured out how to wake.

With her gone Nimue is newly vast, empty and lonely and wild the way it was when Kylo first came to it. The night presses up against the narrow circle of light thrown by the fire, every unlit threshold thick with shadow, every clochán home to the ghosts of a thousand generations of the Force made flesh.

The living are long gone from this place, but their memory abides.

Was Kylo ever one of them?

Who will remember him?

He’d grown used to the ever-present sigh of the sea at night, to there being no other sounds but the rumbling roar of the ocean at the base of the cliffs, the plaintive whisper of the wind through the crags. Alone again, he curls on his little bed in his little hut and listens to the rush of the waves out of the darkness, imagines them rolling inland over the shore, climbing up the slopes of the island to surround his fragile home and swallow it whole.

Sleep is slow to come, and when it does it finds him in brief spells coloured by violent and frightening dreams. Alone again, there is nothing to hold back the tide of them.

-

Fire rains out of the dark sky.

 _The stars are falling_.

Kylo holds out a hand to catch one, but when the ember lands in his palm it’s not stinging heat he feels but  _cold_. He lifts it closer for inspection, but it’s not till he leans too close and the tip of his nose brushes something damp that he realises—

 _Snow_.

Beyond the circle of the flames he can just make out the shapes of trees, a forest of skeletal winter branches shrouded in smoke, flurries of snow blown here and there on the same wind that fuels the inferno.

“Ben?”

Kylo whirls.

She stands at the foot of the throne, watching him with grave eyes. Her white linen wraps are stained with soot, her hair falling loose from the three knots she wears it in.

“Rey,” he says, or thinks he does, his throat so thick with smoke he can scarcely get a word out.

She moves toward him, her feet soundless on the blood-slick stone.

“We can go,” she’s saying, “we can be free. You and me. We can leave it all behind.”

 _Free?_ Kylo frowns. He is free. He broke his chains, he  _killed_ —for her. He did everything for her, doesn’t she know that?

Holding his gaze, Rey lifts a hand and extends it to him. The other gestures to their surroundings, the flames and the snowy forest and the stars.

“None of it matters, anymore. It’s just us now.”

Her fingers curl inward, beckoning, and Kylo takes a hesitant step toward her. He can see it, the future she’s promising them, as clearly as if it were real. The both of them, side-by-side and never alone again, and he wants—oh, he  _wants_.

Rey’s smile is perfectly luminous. She’s close, now, close enough to touch; close enough that he can see the firelight dancing in her eyes.

Close enough that, when his thumb brushes over the ignition of the hilt clutched in his hand and that grisly scarlet blade erupts shrieking into life, it doesn’t need to search to find her heart.

A terrible sound falls from her lips when the red beam pierces her chest and Rey stumbles forward, Kylo’s arms coming up to catch her before she falls. Her eyes find his and that beautiful light is fading.

 _Murderer,_ the curse spills from her lips like blood,  _traitor, father-killer, apostate. Who have you loved that you haven’t betrayed?_

“No, no, no,” he falls with her to the ground, clutching her to him like it might save her.

_Who has loved you that hasn’t paid for it?_

Of the rest he remembers only images, a few scattered fragments of horror and dread floating above the surface of the fog.

In the darkness, a temple burns. Fires climb like yellow flowers through the ruins, reaching up into the night and the storm that rages there, bloody lightning arcing across the sky to split whole worlds in two where it strikes. At night the closing door of a small child’s bedroom takes the last of the light with it, and there’s no one to hear the boy when he cries but there’s  _something_  in the dark and it’s listening, and it’s watching, and every night the shadows slanting across the floor seem a little closer to where he huddles beneath his covers, wishing he was brave enough to climb out of bed and make the leap for the door and the short dash to his mother’s room.

But he’s not brave enough or quick enough, and out of the dark a ruined face appears, features stretched in a rictus smile as a voice whispers  _give me everything,_ but Ben won’t. He  _can’t:_  he’s protecting something, held close to his heart in small fists, and he doesn’t know what it is but he knows that he  _won’t_ let the creature have it, and the monster must hear his thought because the face twists in a snarl and suddenly where there was nothing there’s _pain._ Mottled hands reach out of the shadows, cold light snarling from hooked fingers to wreathe his limbs in tongues of white-hot fire, his body bowing under the strain of agony.

When he wakes, a ragged cry tearing loose from his throat, the force of his anguish rips half of the hut away with it.

Kylo lurches from the bed, manages no more than step before his knees buckle and he stumbles to the ground, pressing a hand over his mouth to stifle the sobs that burst out of him. He shakes with the strength of them, carried back by the sound of collapsing stone and screams to another night, long ago, when he woke from similar nightmares to the sight of a terror he  _wishes_ he’d imagined.

 _Ja’ak,_ he gasps, digging his blunted fingernails into the cracks in the stone as though he might prise his way free of this island and its ghosts, or else his own head, this place where he has  _never_ been granted peace.  _Ja’ak, I am free, I am free_ —

 _Are you?_ The darkness gathering in the ruins croons mockingly to him.  _Is this what you term ‘freedom’? You are an exile, cast out of the galaxy, forgotten by all: just because you have grown blind to your chains does not mean they are gone. You are as much a prisoner as you ever were_.

He’s still trembling, hunched into himself waiting for the convulsions to abate, when something in the air shifts, and the faint grey light of the stars on the back of his eyelids turns to a soft, pacific blue.

Always, in the dark, the ghosts come prowling.

“Ben,” soft and rough with the weight of grief, the familiar voice pulls at the edges of an old wound and Kylo curls further in on himself reflexively, burying his face in his knees and begging,  _praying_ that he’s still dreaming. That this isn’t happening.

Something pushes at the fog shrouding his mind, trying to pierce it.

 _This isn’t happening_.

When Kylo lifts his head, there’s a man sitting beside him on the broken stones.

He bows his head again, a hollow breath of laughter escaping his lips.

“Ben…” again, that name—that name he doesn’t know what to do with anymore, hasn’t known for years, hasn’t  _wanted_ to know until the first time he heard it murmured in her voice but he can’t think of Rey now, if he thinks of her he’ll break—

“I’m sorry.”

Every muscle in his body goes stiff, hands curling into fists where they press against his sides, arms wrapped so tightly around his middle it’s like he’s trying to hold himself together.

_Have you come to say you forgive me?_

The place in his skull where the fog gathers is  _burning._

“I’m sorry,” Skywalker repeats heavily, like saying it more will make it  _mean_  more, like  _anything_ could give those words meaning after everything that’s happened. “There hasn’t been a day that’s passed that I haven’t despised myself for what I did to you.”

But when did that voice grow so weary, so old? The ache in Kylo’s throat turns sharp, like a piece of glass has gotten lodged there. He presses his face further into his knees, wishes he could move his arms enough to cover his head and shut out his uncle’s words but if stuffing his ears had ever silenced the voices he’d have burned out his eardrums years ago, made himself deaf to everything if it meant he never had to hear another  _whisper_ —

A whimper escapes his clenched jaw and Kylo sinks his teeth into his lip, furious at his weakness.

_Were you ever more than a frightened boy, alone in the dark, clawing at your own head to get the voices out? Cowering whelp, made to bend and break and crawl on your knees: were you ever more than this?_

_My chains are broken,_ he thinks bleakly, feeling the blood from his torn lip begin to trickle down his chin.

The fog surrounds him. His skull feels  _tight,_ all of a sudden: there’s a burning pressure at the back of his neck, a creeping heat along the ridges of his spine that fills him with the blind, animal need to  _run_.

He can’t. He’s frozen, numb with terror and the memory of near a thing it had been, that night, how if he’d only slept a little deeper he might never have woken at all.

“I’m so sorry, Ben,” Skywalker sounds a thousand years old—old as the islands, old as the ocean, old as the stars. “I did this. I failed you, in more ways than I would have ever been able to atone for. I failed you as a teacher, and as a guardian,” his voice shakes, “I failed you as an uncle. It was my job to keep you safe, to  _protect_ you…and I failed. I let my fear rule me. I was afraid of the path I saw in your future, and in that fear I drove you straight to it.”

Kylo drags his tongue over his lips, relishes the taste of iron that fills his mouth.

“You asked if I’d come to forgive you…to  _save you.”_  Closer, now; Luke must be less than a foot away in the dark, and Kylo hates to be so blind but he can’t, he  _can’t_ look up. “I said no—not because I didn’t want to, Ben, but—I  _couldn’t_. I can’t forgive you, when I’m the one in need of it. I couldn’t save you, when I’m the one who set you on this path.”

“I brought about all this pain, this  _suffering,_  on our family. I had no right to offer you forgiveness—and I have no right to ask for it. I just…I wanted you to hear what should’ve been said then. And…that you’re not alone. That you’ve never been alone.”

Finally, Kylo lifts his head.

“You wanted to say it?” He spits blood onto the stone, bares his teeth at the ghost, “I don’t want to  _hear_ it.” Pushing himself unsteadily to his feet, he glares down at his uncle. He feels every inch the child again, every inch the boy with no defence against his uncle’s clear blue eyes, so wise and warm and— _green, green as glass in the macabre light of his saber, his careworn face lit hellishly from below and so twisted with hate Ben scarcely recognises him, believes himself to be dreaming still, or else to be looking into the eyes of a stranger—but maybe it’s less that he believes it and more that his mind cannot accept the alternative, yet already the ghastly light is fading and now it truly is his uncle with his saber raised aloft, his_ uncle  _who would kill him, the man who is supposed to love Ben as his own son with his blade raised to put him down like a dog in the night._

“What did you think would happen?” he demands. “What good did you  _possibly_  think you could do?”

Skywalker gazes up at him with such sorrow and all that boy feels is bitter, helpless  _rage._ “I’d hoped it wouldn’t be too late.”

“I don’t  _care_ what you hoped,” Kylo hisses.  _“Leave.”_

He doesn’t wait to see if the ghost obeys, turning on his heel and stalking out barefoot into the night, leaving his uncle alone among the ruins.

He walks without direction or purpose, walks until the balls of his feet ache and he can’t feel his toes in the cold and  _still_ he can’t shake the echo of Skywalker’s voice.

_I’d hoped it wouldn’t be too late._

Kylo scoffs aloud.

He should’ve known the dead wouldn’t leave him be. ~~~~

-

Driven more by habit than intent, he ends up at the temple of the light in time to watch the dawn break.

He sits on the promontory high above the sea, legs dangling over the edge as the sun creeps up over the horizon and the shock of the night begin to fade, the shivering of his limbs and the unsteady hitch in his breath gradually easing with them.

It’s too easy, then, to let his breathing attune to the rush of the waves so far below, to feel the Force all around him and reach for it, let it carry him away from his body and up into the currents that weave across the island. It’s peaceful, like this—lifted up, out of his own skin, floating, drifting…how easy it would be to let those currents bear him away…no memory, no past, nothing left to harm or be harmed, nothing left of him but the Force.

The Force, which even now is showing him something, indistinct and clouded as a dream.

The past.

The future?

Both, Kylo realises. This moment…it’s neither past nor future, but a glimpse into eternity.

Some-when else in time, a young woman sits in this same place, legs crossed beneath her and her chin tilted up into the sun, her body wreathed in the light of the Force. She smiles in wonderment as it floods through her: she’s reaching for something. Listening; learning.

In the morning light, she  _glows_.

There’s more than light in her, though, and it answers to the call of something deep below the island. Kylo watches her reach for it, barely aware of what she’s doing but knowing that she  _must,_ that she can’t fight this call, that she isn’t  _supposed_ to fight it—

 _It’s calling me…_ her voice, distorted, fractured through time.

Something pulls at her, would draw her back from that edge and it’s strong but so is she: they reach for each other now, girl and void, there’s something alike in both of them, something wild and hungering and  _needy—_ oh, how she needs, this girl, how deeply she longs, can hardly find the words for the depth of yearning inside her but that thing below the island has the words, knows precisely the shape of the chasm inside her; reaches out to her and pleads  _let me make you whole, let me show you—_

This isn’t her memory. It’s something else. This is how she is remembered, here, by the stones and the waves and the salt-wind on the sea, by the island and the ocean and the Force itself: this Rey, younger and lonelier than the one who left here yesterday, lives on like an insect caught in amber, a single endless moment of uncertainty and hope, an echo scattered across eternity.

It’s more than gravity wells and singularities that makes Ahch-To the way it is; Kylo’s known that for a long time, now. There’s some magic here, some  _power_ that breathes through every atom of this world and weaves its spell around everything it touches, all of time turning back upon itself to play out like a holo across the present.

Through time and though space, Rey’s hand reaches, and before Kylo can stop himself, he’s reaching back.

-

A loud warble from perilously close by jerks him abruptly out of the trance.

Blearily, he opens his eyes and blinks at the brightness of the day: the sun is hours higher in the sky than it had been, and the porgs that nest in this part of the crag have begun to return from their morning fishing.

It’s that, more than the gnawing ache in his belly or the faint light-headedness making the sunlight dance in his eyes, that reminds Kylo he hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning.

-

He’s attempting to make sense of the system by which Rey’s organised his stores when the disgruntled muttering of the lanais outside suddenly cuts off, silence descending around the village.

When Kylo emerges, there’s a blue-limned figure sitting by the fire.

His hands have curled into fists at his sides before he realises it’s not his uncle.

Kylo doesn’t recognise him, but there’s something so… _tranquil,_ about his Force presence, a steadiness that he’s never felt before in another being, save for—

—save for Rey, in those moments when they were one, when everything fell into place and for the first time perfect equilibrium felt as though it were within reach.

Without a word, he lifts his hood and stomps away towards the steps to the beach.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” the dead man calls after him. His voice is warm with amusement, and carries the inflection of a Core accent. Kylo ignores him.

Ahch-To has always had its ghosts, but he’d almost gotten used to their presence. They weren’t _here_ with him, not really: they were the imprint of another time, like Nimue was flipping through her memories.

Why they’ve suddenly decided to start _talking_ to him…

The stranger is sitting on the rocks when Kylo gets down to the shore, his robes spread out around him on the grey sand as though he’s been there for hours.

Scowling, Kylo turns on his heel and walks back the way he’d come.

He gets all of a dozen steps before a voice at his left shoulder nearly jolts him out of his skin.

“I know it was an accident, but I don’t think the caretakers would turn down a helping hand,” the ghost strolls at his side now. “I’m sure they might even like you better, if you offered one.”

Kylo just keeps walking, his eyes focussed straight ahead. He knows it’s a futile endeavour. The Jedi are renowned for their patience—he can only imagine how much worse it gets after they’re  _dead_.

“Your grandfather was a stubborn young man, too.”

Kylo comes to an abrupt halt.

Slowly, he turns toward the stranger, taking in the sombre expression; the weight of knowledge and memory in his gaze.

“Who are you?” he asks unevenly.

The dead man lifts his chin as if to say,  _finally_.

“My name was Qui-Gon Jinn,” he says.

Kylo stares at him.

He knows that name. He’s read it before,  _heard_ it before, somewhere—Qui-Gon Jinn, the knight who mentored his namesake. The knight who discovered his grandfather in slavery on Tatooine. The knight who died protecting his grandmother.

“You knew him,” he says, when the ringing in his ears has faded away enough to hear again. “You found him.”

“I did,” Jinn bows his head, grave with everything that means. “On Tatooine, when he was just a boy.”

 _You caused all of this to happen,_ Kylo wants to curse, wants to scream, wants to  _blame. You were the start of it all._

“I brought him to the Jedi,” the dead knight continues, “and, some would say, I sealed our fate.”

The Jedi had brought about their own downfall, compromised their code and allowed their order to be drawn into a war without end. Their fate had been sealed long before Anakin Skywalker ever set foot in the temple on Coruscant.

He was only the flourishing of what their corruption had sown.

“What do you want?” Kylo asks.

“Nothing,” answers Qui-Gon, and shouldn’t it feel stranger, to be speaking with a man who has been dead since his  _grandparents_ were children? “To talk, for a little while, if we may.”

Kylo scowls. “Did Skywalker put you up to this?”

 “No. Your uncle knows better than to try again, so soon.”

 _Wise of him._ “Tell him not to bother. There’s nothing to be said.”

“Tell him yourself, when you see him. I simply thought, since we both find ourselves with a surfeit of time on our hands, that you might wish to know a little more of your family?”

Kylo goes still.

His family? The Skywalker line, which never did a better thing than consigning itself to extinction?

His  _blood_.

He nods, numbly.

“Very well.”

“Why?”

“Why, what?”

“Why are you here?”

Jinn considers his answer. “Because…there is still a part for you to play, in the future to come, and there are many things in need of redressing. You were sent to this island to die, but the Living Force is not done with you yet.”

Kylo’s hands curl slowly back into fists. He closes his eyes, breathes deeply in an effort to conquer the _panic_ fighting its way up out of his chest.  _Then when?_ he wants to snarl.  _When_  will it be done with him? What further use can it have for him? What will it take, before the Force is finally satisfied with the ruin it has made of his family?

Qui-Gon reads it all on his face.

“Is it peace you want?” he asks. “Would you prefer to end your life on this island, untroubled by the galaxy?”

“My preferences are of no consequence,” Kylo replies stiffly.

“I would do right by your family, before the end,” Jinn folds his hands into the sleeves of his robe, “so to me, at least, that isn’t true.”

“It’s a little too late for that, isn’t it?”

The dead Jedi regards him steadily. “You’re alive, are you not?”

When Kylo looks as though he’s about to storm off again, he sighs. “The Force has always been with your family. I do not wish to believe that means your line is fated for misfortune, but…”

“You wouldn’t be  _wrong._ ”

“Things turned out the way they did, as they always would have, as they always will. I don’t presume to believe I could’ve changed them, had I been there—far better people than I tried. But…that isn’t to say I don’t regret. There was much I could’ve done, while I lived. Perhaps I was the one who set Anakin on his path—perhaps I abandoned him to it. Perhaps I failed him from the moment I failed to save his mother.” Jinn’s gaze shifts to him. “Your great-grandmother.”

Kylo blinks. He knows next to nothing of his grandfather’s mother, the woman of whose line he is the last. He’s heard some of what Luke had learned from his own uncle’s stories, but there’s no one left alive who’d known Shmi Skywalker in person.

His stomach twists with something not unlike shame that he’d never sought to learn more.

“You knew her.”

“Too briefly,” Qui-Gon admits. “You take after her.”

The _twist_ becomes an ache. Kylo drags his teeth over his broken lip, uses the sting to clear his head.

He’s always been under the impression that his appearance is something of an—an _aberration_. Han used to say he looked too much like him, same nose and brow and smile with just enough of his mother in him to save his looks, but Ben had always struggled to see it. He wasn’t strikingly beautiful like Leia, or elegant and fine like his aunts, and nor had he inherited his father’s roguish good looks: he possessed an odd amalgam of features, his black hair and narrow gaze seeming to come from nowhere in their family.

 “Tell me about her,” he says. “And my grandfather. Tell me about Anakin.”

It’s such a small thing to be sure about, and yet even as he says the words Kylo feels the  _rightness_ of it _._

Inside him there’s a scar, a broken bone that never mended properly, and he can feel the edges of the wound begin to tear open again as he faces up to this part of his past. It hurts, but the Force moves through him, urges him on with eager whispers, and he knows that this is a scar that  _needs_ to be reopened if it is to ever have a hope of healing.

And, he finds, he wants it to.

Jinn moves to sit on a nearby rock again, his edges softening in the sunlight. “It was on Naboo that I first encountered your family,” he says thoughtfully. “Perhaps we should begin there.”

-

The lanais greet his return with a warmth that reminds Kylo (just in case he’d forgotten) he’s far from popular at the moment, but when he strides right past them into the wreckage of the clochán and proceeds to hoist one of the heavier cornerstones up into his arms, the chorus of resentful muttering falls quiet.

They go on this way: in silence, the lone human working alongside the little sisters through the afternoon until the tumbled ruin he’d made of the hut is cleared aside and there’s only an embarrassing gulf and a mess of grit and dust beneath the collapsed roof. Kylo stands there contemplating his next move for a few seconds until he becomes aware of someone standing at his side, and something whacks him hard in the shin.

‘Something’ turns out to be a long-handled broomstick wielded by Alcida-Auka, who holds the thing out to him with a look on her face that just  _dares_ him to argue.

He glowers back. That broom is far too small for him; he’d have to bend double just to reach the ground with it. The diminutive matriarch’s blue eyes narrow into slits, and if he ever hopes to sleep peacefully on this island again Kylo knows what he has to do.

Begrudgingly, swallowing what little is left of his pride, he reaches for the broom.

The lanais clear off back to their village before nightfall, but Kylo keeps moving till he can’t see well enough to know if he’s even making a difference. Moving is good; moving helps. Focussing all his energies on gathering up the stones his outburst had scattered means he’s not focussing on the gnawing pangs of hunger in his stomach or the faint pulse of a dehydration headache behind his eyes, or the memory of what had happened just after he’d destroyed the hut last night.

When it’s too dark to even see his hands in front of him, he raids the supply hut for food and blankets, and makes his way up to the halls of the light.

He won’t sleep down in the village again.

(In the temple, at least, he’ll have a harder time tearing walls down when he dreams.)

-

What dreams he has up there are lighter things, fragments of places he’s been and places he hasn’t: memories that don’t belong to him but have become a part of him anyway, bleeding over the bond that connects his mind to hers.

He wonders which memories of his she keeps—if she dreams of them too; if she thinks of him at all, at night, the way he can’t seem to help but think of her.

-

He’s already sorting through the stones when the sisters return the next morning.

His mind runs over with thoughts of the day before; of everything Jinn had said, of the thread of tragedy, betrayal and failure that seems to be the one constant legacy of the Skywalker line.

Somewhere around noon, one of the lanais calls over to him. They’ve all stopped work, gathering around the firepit for the midday meal, and several of the sisters are watching him expectantly. Kylo spares them a half-hearted scowl, turning back to carry on working while they mutter amongst themselves.

He can’t tell what they’re saying about him, but he doubts it’s kind.

It doesn’t take that long, to build a hut: Kylo learns this over the next fortnight or so. The most painstaking part is figuring out where to place the stones, since the corbelled roof is shaped without mortar, and apparently this isn’t something the caretakers are prepared to let him do unsupervised.

Even when it’s done he refuses to sleep down in the village again. It’s more than just the ghosts: there’s something about the temple that quiets his mind, and for the first time in what feels like years he’s sleeping almost the full night through. Most nights he only wakes once or twice, his head fogged with vague and shadowed dreams that feel like they belong to someone else.

During the day, he works on his project to restore the star-charts. It’s coming along a little better now that he’s gotten more adept at making ink—his first attempts had been messy things, too dry or too viscous or bleeding right through the ancient vellum. One drawing had even started to mould, which he assumed was something to do with the fish oil. It’s been so long since he’d made his own ink that he barely remembers how.

Sometimes, when he walks along the shore, Jinn’s there. He doesn’t always speak: they simply meditate, letting the Force flow through them until the world and everything in it fades away, the ache of old griefs loosening like knots, the weight of half-forgotten hurts dissipating slowly into nothing with the passage of time.

He feels his uncle’s presence around the island in the weeks that follow, but Skywalker doesn’t show himself. He is, Kylo assumes, waiting.

He can wait a little longer.

-

This place is doing things to him.

A dozen times or more, over the past few months, he’s caught a glimpse of Rey around the island. Sometimes it’s the bond pulling them together, though she gives no sign that she ever notices, but sometimes it’s for no more than a few seconds before she’s gone again and he starts to suspect then that it’s something else, like the moment he’d seen her on the cliff above the temple; that the Force is showing him flickers of the past.

Or the future. She looks different, on those occasions when he’s close enough to see her clearly: she dresses differently, less of the practical fatigues and flight-suits he remembers and more comfortable, civilian garments, sweaters and skirts and leggings in colours that suit her terribly well.

The only thing that doesn’t change is that she never spares him a moment’s glance.

The wellspring calls more insistently now: he feels it tugging at him from the shadowy grotto under the island when the fog descends and he  _wants_ to follow it, to find the source of it because there’ll be answers there too, there’ll be the truth he’s sought his whole life, but another voice in the back of his mind whispers  _not yet_ and for some reason he trusts it to guide him, and so—

And so: he waits.

-

The dozing porg doesn’t even stir when Kylo slumps down on the grass beside it, flopping onto his back to stare up at the cloudless blue sky.

Summer has come around again: the days are longer and warmer, wildflowers creeping up out of the grass here and there, the sunlight splashing down to brighten everything it touches. The porglets are growing by the day and the island echoes with their piping calls.

Five months, now, since he last saw another living human, and the tally he’s been keeping informs him that he should have company soon.

The memory of those three months he spent waiting, not knowing if anyone was coming or if he’d been left to fend for himself after all, warns him not to get his hopes up.

But Rey knows, now, about the time difference. She wouldn’t let it happen again. She wouldn’t make him _wait_ again. Anyone else might, but this is Rey—obstinate, brilliant, contrary Rey. She wouldn’t.

She’ll be here.


	7. Six

On the island, their horizon had been the ocean; that vast, unbroken plane of water as far as the eye could see and still beyond, till the world fell away and there was nothing but sky, nothing but the vast sprawling immensity of the light.

In Galactic City, it’s—well,  _city_.

And she hates it.

Once, sitting out on the promontory, she’d daydreamed of visiting the other islets in the archipelago. Ben had found their names on one of his maps and they sound like something out of a fairytale when she rolls them on her tongue; Tironoe and Glitonea, Moran and Thiton _,_ silent grey sisters rising out of the cobalt sea. They’re too small to land a ship on—the only way she can think of getting there is if the caretakers lend her a boat, and she’s not entirely sure they would (a leaky one, maybe), but it’s been an idle fancy of hers for months now.

Ben would probably take some convincing, but he must be bored witless stuck on Nimue and the terms of his sentence only prohibit him leaving the planet. There’s nothing to stop them taking a little skiff out over the waves and exploring the other islands in the chain, getting some distance between themselves and the one that’s been his home for the past year. She’ll persuade him, even if she has to resort to bribery.

She gives it five months, and then the itch in her bones gets too much to bear and the Force feels like it’s  _pulling_ at her and she—

—oh, who is she trying to fool?

-

She knows as soon as she sets eyes on him that it wasn’t enough.

“Rey,” her name falls from his lips on a clumsy breath as Ben lurches to his feet. He’s halfway across the little courtyard towards her before she can even lift a hand in greeting, looking so utterly  _floored_ to see her that Rey wonders if he’d somehow missed the sound of her ship breaking atmo.

“You’re here,” he says in wonderment, and a knot loosens in her chest to hear his voice again.

 _Speak, Rey._ She still hasn’t said a word.

“Hi,” she breathes, smiling despite the growing ache in her heart because stars, she’s  _glad_ to see him, and the way his dark eyes are drinking her in lets her know the feeling’s mutual. “Did you not hear me come in?”

Ben shrugs. “I was sleeping.”

Cautiously now, as if he doesn’t quite believe she’s really here, he moves closer. It gives her a chance to look at him properly.

_Oh, Ben._

If there was any doubt in her mind that Ahch-To cares nothing for her good intentions, it dies now.

In her mind he’s stayed the same, preserved the way he looked when they said goodbye on the  _Falcon’s_ ramp half a year ago. Rey hasn’t allowed herself to look at him since then, determined to keep at least one of her promises, and so she hasn’t observed the changes in him as they’ve occurred—which might have made them seem less drastic; might have kept them from cutting her so deeply now.

His hair falls soft around his shoulders, wild and curly in the sea air, his jaw and chin dusted with a week or so’s worth of coarse scruff that does nothing to disguise how lean and tanned his face has become. He’s still tall and broad as a bantha, she doesn’t think he’ll ever be anything else, but he’s lost so much of the  _softness_ she remembers, his clothes hanging looser on a frame gone almost rangy with neglect.

It’s more than half a year could do to a person, and most heartbreaking of all is the disbelieving wonder in his eyes.

Her heart sinking to somewhere behind her navel, Rey steels herself to ask.

“How long?”

Ben looks away, thinking. Counting.

“Three hundred and forty days, give or take.” His shoulders lift a little when he answers, like he’s trying to shrug it off again—like it doesn’t matter, as though the fact that he’s had to wait twice as long as he should’ve even after she’d  _sworn_ to be on time is nothing to him—but the cold in Rey’s chest spreads to grip her heart in a fist of ice.

 _A year._ A year since she’d left him with all those promises, since he last spoke to another living human.

“Oh, gods, Ben,” she steps forward to close the distance between them. She wants to reach out, to let their hands touch because it’s always been easier without words—for her, who never learned to wield them with any grace, touch has always been the easiest way of communicating.

(More to the point, she’s fairly sure she’ll throw up if she opens her mouth.)

Courage abandons her, and the hand she’d half-lifted towards him falls back to her side.

“I’m  _sorry,_ ” it comes out in a whisper.

 _I tried,_  she wants to say:  _I tried to come earlier, this time, I didn’t even wait six months_. She would mean it as a comfort, to reassure him that she never forgot; that it was  _never_  because she had more important things to think about or to do, but even to her own mind it sounds hollow when this is the second time she’s made him wait.

“Don’t be. It’s this place, it’s not your fault.”

 _No? Makes a change._ “Are you—” she falters. “How have you been?”

 _Really, Rey? Nearly a full year alone and that’s all you can think of to say to him?_ She bites her lip, cursing herself inwardly. “Are you well?”

Ben looks down at himself as though trying to gauge how much of a lie he’ll get away with. “Yes,” he ventures, “it’s not so bad.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rey says again, her voice cracking, “I thought—”

“It’s fine,” he cuts her off gently. He looks almost baffled by her distress. “Rey, I’m in exile. I’m supposed to be alone.”

 _You’re not alone,_ she wants to argue out of sheer stubborn reflex, but he is, isn’t he? He was given a comm unit but its use is restricted to emergencies, on a frequency not even Leia can access, and Rey—his one connection with the rest of the galaxy—can’t manage a simple thing like keeping track of the time on this world accurately enough to make it within three months of her drop dates.

“I’ll speak to command,” she says, refusing to be placated, “I’ll figure this out.”

They could use the comm to check on him—or Ben could check in, let them know when it’s coming up on six months for him, since there’s apparently no link between the time that passes on Ahch-To and how much has passed in the rest of the galaxy. They should’ve been doing it already, Rey thinks bitterly. Check-ins should’ve been  _mandatory._

Ben looks so patiently amused by her frustration and she wants to snap at him for it, to say that even if  _he_ won’t take this seriously she will, but then he’s crossing those last few feet between them, that softness returning to his eyes, and she can’t quite find the will to do it.

“It’s good to see you,” he says, looking her over in that way he has—the way that makes her feel bared, opened-up in a way she should hate because it’s a kind of vulnerability she never learned how to endure, but it makes her feel  _seen,_ too, and maybe that makes the rest worth it.

To be known in this way, to be understood in her  _atoms…_ she’s missed it.

“You too,” she exhales heavily, letting out the worst of the stress with it. “I mean it, Ben. I’ll fix this.”

“I know,” he says, probably more to pacify her than anything.

It’s not like he can stop her, after all.

-

“Will you tell me what you’ve been doing?” Ben lowers himself onto the opposite side of the firepit, still watching her like he’s half-afraid she’ll disappear if he so much as blinks. She’s familiar with the intensity of his stare—or she used to be, anyway—but the way he’s gazing at her now is almost  _hungry_ and she has no idea what to do about it, so she settles for nothing.

(She’s being foolish, probably. It’s only because he hasn’t seen another human in so long.)

The suns have just crept below the horizon, staining the edge of the sea a bloody shade of red and the rest of the sky a dark teal-blue. There are a few scattered clouds here and there, lit from below as though by flames from beyond the world’s edge, while overhead a few pale stars are just twinkling into life.

The fire throws dramatic shadows across Ben’s face, highlighting the new hollows under his cheekbones, the wildness that’s taken hold of him.

“Tell me…I don’t know…just, something. Something you’ve done, or seen, out there.”

“Something,” Rey blows out a breath, tugging her shawl more closely around her. “No politics?” She’s glad she’d thought to bring it with her: the seasons must be on the turn again if it’s been almost a full year since she was last here, and there’s a definite bite to the evening air.

“If you’d prefer,” the corner of Ben’s mouth twitches. “No adventures?”

Her smile is a little more real. “Depends on your definition.”

“New worlds,” he says, his deep voice soft and almost  _dreamy,_ “new places. Tell me what you’ve seen.”

_Tell me that there’s still something beyond this sky._

“Oh. Then—yes, a few, actually.” She can’t help it: Rey knows her face is lighting up and she knows that Ben can see it. “I’ve been to Onderon, now. And Florrum.”

“Where did you go?”

“We stayed in Iziz city. I don’t know if you ever went, but it was amazing,” she looks into the fire, thinking of those vast verdant jungles sprawled out around the walls of the city, and then—with less fondness—the reeking fields of Doshar. “Florrum…less so.”

“I’d have thought you would’ve had enough of deserts, by now.”

“You’d be right.”

“Why were you there?”

Her smile slips.

It’s not fear that makes her hesitate. She knows there’s no harm might come from telling him: whatever fight was in him is gone, and he was never a good enough liar to hide it from her. Besides, it’s not like he’s going anywhere.

But—he won’t like it.

And she can’t fault him, not one bit.

“Chasing rumours,” she sighs, bringing her mug to her lips to take a sip and draw out the inevitable. “There are Force-sensitives out there, in the galaxy.”

Ben’s shoulders tense slightly. Something cold creeps across his face.

“And you’re…what, rebuilding the Jedi out of them?”

Rey shakes her head. “I don’t think I ever could—or would. It’s just me and a bunch of old books that I can barely read. I don’t want to lead some weird cult. I just…” she frowns, looking down at her lap. “I don’t want them to be alone, if they don’t have to be.”

When she lifts her gaze, Ben’s has fallen to the flames, something in their golden heart holding his attention.

“What will you teach them?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she admits, glad that here at least she’s free to say it. It weighs so heavily on her, that it really is just her—that though she isn’t a Jedi she is, for all intents and purposes, the last of them. There’s no one else: Rey holds the Order’s past and future in her hands, and she has  _no_ idea what to do with it.

Reaching out to others like her—like  _them_ —had seemed a good place to start.

Ben is right to ask, though: what can she offer these new generations of Force-sensitives? She can’t translate the Jedi histories, their sacred texts, can’t share their wisdom with future students—stars, she can’t even tell one lightsaber form from another. She’s just…stumbling around in the dark, following her gut and the Force and hoping they lead her right.

“I think,” Ben says at length, “that they aren’t alone, is an important place to begin.”

He understands better than she’d thought he might.

“I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past,” she confesses.  _I don’t want them to learn the lessons we learned._ “I thought…just…start there. If they’re afraid, start there. I was afraid. I still am.”

“That never goes away,” Ben mutters, and when she looks up his eyes are twinkling.

Something tugs on her memory, then—a moment from half a lifetime ago. “You told me not to be, once. Afraid, I mean.” Why she’s reminding them both of that day, Rey can’t say. “Do you remember?”

He frowns, pulling his lower lip between his teeth to chew on while he thinks. “I remember. But you weren’t afraid. You were fearless.”

She snorts. “No I wasn’t.”

“You seemed it.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t the only one wearing a mask. I wasn’t about to let some ghoulish prick know he scared the life out of me.”

“I think it’s called being brave,” Ben says, and she can tell he’s trying very hard not to laugh at her scathing assessment of their first meeting, that day in the forest by Lake Nymeve. “Tell me about the places you’ve seen. My memory’s not what it was. I feel like I remember less all the time.”

“You sound like you’ve been here decades,” she teases gently.

“I will be,” he reminds her, and in it she hears  _I am, I have been, and I always will._

In the uneasy silence that follows, Rey remembers Leia’s gift.

“I brought you something,” she says, flipping open her satchel to rummage around inside. “When I mentioned how bored you were, that you’d been mending those star-charts, the Senator—Leia—she said to give you this.” From her bag, safe at her side where it’s travelled since Leia gave it to her, Rey pulls out a cloth-wrapped package bound with a blue ribbon and holds it out to him.

The Force gathers in the air between them a split second before the bundle lifts out of her grip, floating over the fire and into Ben’s outstretched hand. Slowly, as though half-expecting it to detonate in his lap, he unties the ribbon and sets it carefully beside him.

“It was yours, she said,” Rey continues quietly, when the wrappings fall aside to reveal a set of writing tools—pens, styli, and delicate brushes, stained with ink and worn with use and care.

Ben traces his fingers lightly over them as though retracing old steps.

“She said you liked to write, when you were younger, and she thought…”

What Leia had thought, Rey can’t say either. She’d fallen silent, simply nodding and pressing the wrapped bundle into the younger woman’s hands, trusting that it alone would be enough.

Ben looks across at her, inclines his head once, and wraps up his mother’s gift again. The way his hand lingers over it when he sets it aside lets her know that perhaps, this once, Leia’s judgement hadn’t been so far off the mark where her son is concerned.

“Thank you,” he says softly.

Rey nods. “Will you show me? What you’ve been doing? I want to see those charts of yours.”

Maybe there’s a map of the archipelago in among them somewhere. She still hasn’t given up on her plan to explore the islands, and if the weather holds she might just try it this visit.

Ben smiles, just a bit.

“First thing tomorrow.”

-

He’d forgotten what it feels like, having her sleeping so near. The last time she’d stayed she slept on the _Falcon,_ preferring her nest of blankets in the first mate’s berth to the variety of unforgiving stone beds on offer in the village, and Ben hadn’t blamed her, but this time the two of them stay up talking so far into the night that neither have the will to make the trek up to the temple or back down to the ship in the dark, so when the time comes that Rey can’t stop yawning long enough to get a sentence out he simply directs her to one of the huts.

She goes without protest, heading off a little ways down the slope toward the clochán tucked into the curve of the cliff.

It occurs to Ben as he’s drifting off that she’d chosen the same hut he had been pulled towards, that night so long ago, where he’d seen the two figures sat beside the fire.

He wakes only once during the night, and sleeps later than usual, and in the morning he emerges to find Rey sat at the firepit again, blanket wrapped around her shoulders to watch the sunrise. She smiles a little sleepily when she notices him. Her hair is braided over her shoulder—it’s longer than he remembers, touched with gold by the dawn.

There’s something so strangely domestic about the simple act of walking out into the morning light and coming to sit beside her at the hearth, a pot of caf already brewing over the flames. It feels like they could’ve done this every morning for years; like in another life, another universe, perhaps they have done.

-

“I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh oh.”

_“Hey.”_

Ben smirks when Rey pulls a face at him, ducking away from the pebble aimed at his chest. “Sorry.”

“No, you are not.”

“No,” still smiling, he nudges her back to her interrupted thought. “What were you thinking?”

“Well,” Rey looks down at her knees, then out over the sea again. “What I was saying, last night, about having all the old Jedi books and not being able to read them…it gave me an idea.” She’d mulled it over during the night, while she lay on her uncomfortable bed a few huts down the slope from him. “You read High Galactic, right?” Ben nods. “Great. Some of the books are in that, and I want to learn to read it—and write it, as well.”

“That’s smart.”

“It shouldn’t take that long, should it? I can stay for a bit longer, this time.”

“Wait.” Ben frowns. “You want me to teach you?”

“Well…I mean, I could teach myself, I suppose, but I just thought maybe…” Rey shrugs lightly, “doesn’t matter. Just a thought.”

 _“No—”_ he’s probably reacting with far too much enthusiasm given the mundanity of her request but— _honestly—_ the thought of actual intellectual stimulation is appealing enough to be worth seeming overeager for, after a year of sketching constellations, doodling islands and idly wondering if he could teach a porg to hold a pen. “No, I…I can do it. I can teach you. You’re right, it won’t take long at all.”

(Not that the prospect of teaching Rey has ever been  _unappealing._ )

Even as he offers, Ben finds himself contemplating for how long he could feasibly drag the lesson out.

Rey gifts his eagerness with a radiant smile. “Can we start today?”

Gods, he thinks. Does she imagine he might for a single second refuse?

-

“So what language is this?” Rey peers over his shoulder to where he’s busy scribbling something down on a sheet of paper. She’s followed him up to the temple, where he keeps the charts in the drier air, and now they’re sat in the sun with a few pages weighed down in front of them.

“Basic. The alphabet is High Galactic, though.”

“What does it say?”

“Here,” Ben passes her the sheet. “Work it out.”

On the page he’s written out the two alphabets, Aurebesh below their High Galactic counterparts, with something in Galactic written underneath in a clear, compact hand. He nudges it toward her. “Go on.”

Rey takes the paper, squinting.  _Patterns. It’s just pattern recognition._ She’s good at that.

It’s not been three seconds when she looks up at him, a glorious smile lighting up her face. “Rey,” she says. “It’s my name.”

Ben looks down, abashed by her delight in such an insignificant gesture. “It’s one way of spelling it,” he demurs, “I wasn’t sure how you did, but…”

Rey shrugs, unconcerned. “Doesn’t matter. I know there’s—ways of spelling things, proper ways, but I never had to write my name, so I never picked one. Though…sometimes I thought, maybe…” she bends to be closer to the page, her hair spilling over one shoulder as she scrawls something down in haphazard Aurebesh, “…like this.”

He leans in to read it over her shoulder. “‘Ræh’?”

“Yeah. I found a helmet—an X-wing pilot’s helmet—out in the Graveyard, once. The rebel who wore it was called Dosmit Ræh.” A soft, sad smile crosses her face. “I thought that if I ever had to spell my name out, I’d do it that way, but…” the smile widens into something truer, her fingers moving almost fondly over the paper, “I think I like this way better.”

Ben swallows down the urge to wage bare-fisted war on Rey’s entire youth long enough to return her smile.

(To think he’d ever believed she might have saved him out of spite—that he’d imagined she could _ever_ place so little value in life when she’d had to fight so hard for every day of it. She shames him without even trying.)

Rey reads over her name a few more times, and then she’s looking up at him earnestly.

“Show me something else?”

-

He should’ve known that once she had him where she wanted him, she wouldn’t let him go so easily.

“You write so beautifully,” she says with no small amount of envy, studiously watching him pen another message for her to translate. “BB says my handwriting looks like fried circuitry.”

“BB?”

“BB-8,” she glances up at him, “you know—the astromech you were after, when we met. Orange and white.”

Ben looks away, his eyes losing their focus again like he’s rooting around in his memory for the one he needs. Eventually, his lips twitch slightly.

“That droid led me to you.” As soon as the words leave his mouth his cheeks are turning  _scarlet_ —oh, he hadn’t meant for that to come out at  _all,_ had he? Hastily Ben hunches over his writing, putting his shoulder to her so she can’t see the mortification writ plainly on his face.

His reaction confounds her. He’s not  _wrong,_  after all.

“I suppose they did,” she says softly, “maybe I should thank them.”

“For what?” Ben raises one dark brow at her. “They seem to have brought you more trouble than anything.”

 _Seriously?_  Rey looks at him flatly. “Because Jakku was all rainbows and easy living until then,” her voice carries just a touch of sharpness. “I’d still be there if it weren’t for BB and Finn.”

His eyes do that thing again—go fuzzy, and the nagging thought that’s been chewing away at the back of her mind since last night sinks its teeth in a little deeper.

 _My memory’s not what it was,_  he said. She’d thought he only meant that he was going a bit stir-crazy confined to Nimue’s shores, that he spends so much time alone here that his memories of the other worlds he’s known are losing their clarity, but now she’s not so sure.

She can see it, every time he has to think about a name or a place she mentions—and it’s not like she goes out of her way to bring up the past, but she can’t help but feel like this place, this island, the  _Force_ itself is burying it, one memory at a time, and next time she visits there might not be much of him left at all.

-

The day slips by too quickly. Before he knows it the light has begun to fade, and the world turns slowly to shadow and gold as sunset nears.

There’s a moment’s anxiety until he remembers Rey saying she might stay longer, this time.

(He doesn’t know how long  _longer_ is, only that it means staving off the silence and the sea for a few days more, or even a matter of hours, he’ll take it.)

She’s progressed to translating full sentences in her uneven, determined hand, passing the pen between right and left to test her ambidexterity  _just because_. How  _he’s_ progressed to half-leaning over her, close enough that he can see the muscle moving in her jaw as she concentrates, he couldn’t say, but Rey hasn’t reacted to his proximity yet and far be it from him to move first when this is the nearest he’s been to another person in almost a year.

“How’ve the dreams been?” Rey asks suddenly, looking up from her work to study him instead.

“Better,” he stares down at the hand the rests on the corner of her paper, fingers curling and uncurling lazily. “Since I started sleeping up here, they haven’t been as bad. It’s like…something’s keeping them out. Like there’s a veil between this place and everything else, and they can’t get through.” He chews thoughtfully on his lip, displeased with the analogy. In some ways the temple of the light feels more connected, more a part of the universe than anywhere else on the island, like diving into a wellspring of the Force itself, but in others… “it’s quieter.”

“Good,” she says simply, and then to his everlasting astonishment she reaches up with her free hand to brush the hair out of his eyes. “You look like you need the sleep.”

Ben ducks his head, reeling slightly from her touch, and the movement makes the hair she’d pushed aside fall back over his face again. Rey clicks her tongue impatiently. “And a haircut. I left you a knife, y’know.”

“I know.” He does. He found it, and after a while even found the courage to use it. “It’s just—”

“What?”

“Difficult, getting round the back,” he admits. “There aren’t any mirrors on this island, you know.”

Something in her face changes, a fleeting shadow like a cloud passing over the sun.

“There’s one,” she reminds him quietly.

He has to concede the point there, but the truth is that Nimue’s lack of mirrors is only half of his reasoning—the easiest half, the half with the least weight to it. The other half is that he simply  _likes_ the feeling of his hair curling around his shoulders again, feathery ends flicking up to tickle his chin, the soft weight of it on the back of his neck. He hasn’t worn it this long since he was a child, when he’d let it grow out just because he liked it that way, because it felt better to have an extra layer between him and the world. And, because he used to think it made him look a little bit more like his mother.

It’s at her knee that he learns how to manage his long hair, picking up the tradition of Alderaanian braids from Leia’s hands with the air of a sacred ritual and a family secret wrapped up in one. He adores the peaceful, focussed intimacy of it: this is his mother’s heritage,  _their_  heritage, kept alive by the work of her hands; this is what she had done with her own mother when she was a child, and Breha with her mother before them. There is lineage and history in this quiet, intimate activity of weaving together his mother’s silken hair into braids and coronets and coils, shaping symbols out of it—an entire hidden language to be deciphered only by those with the secret, and his mother is teaching him, one braid, one knot at a time, to read it.

When she’s occupied he takes to practicing on his godmothers, with varying success. Mon keeps her chestnut hair too short to really do much with, though she’s always wonderful to talk to, but his other aunt’s ever-changing curls make for excellent braids, and she’s endlessly patient with Ben’s curious fingers—clumsy, probably, looking back, he is graceless and heavy-handed even as a child, even when he tries so hard to be gentle, but Ammi never complains, letting him fiddle with her hair for hours while she speaks with his mother or attends to her own work, telling Ben stories over her shoulder of the adventures she’d had while she served with the Rebel Fleet. She’s always full of stories—about Leia, more often than not, and he learns more about his mother’s days in the rebellion from those hours with his aunt than he ever will from speaking with Leia herself. She’s never seemed to consider her wild heroics with the rebels so important as the work of restoration and rebuilding that came after.

He likes to hear her talk about it, though, especially when they sit together in the evenings and he gently unwinds her hair from its intricate arrangement of braids and loops. They become a tangible thing connecting him to her; a bond that she continues to choose every day by sharing her people’s traditions with him, and it makes the quiet wrongness in Ben’s stomach lessen a little bit, the knots in his heart that wind tighter every time she’s late home, every meal she misses, slackening slightly. It doesn’t cut the knots entirely, or quiet the voices that whisper she only  _chooses_ him because he’s all she has, but sitting with her long hair spilling over his hands, the sound of her voice as she recounts her day to him sharpening on some remark that makes him giggle with the bold,  _un-senatorial_ tone she’d take towards some of her colleagues…it’s as close to peace as he remembers.

Sometimes he’ll ask if he can go with her, the next day: sometimes she’ll agree. Sometimes she’ll lean into his knees and tilt her head back so she can look up at him and ask  _won’t you be bored, though?_

 _No,_ he always says:  _I like it. It’s interesting._

 _(No,_  he means:  _I’ll be with you._ )

One birthday, Aunt Ammi gifts him with a circlet of Gatalentan silver, dainty and fine as a constellation in his coal-black curls. She wears similar things all the time, whispers conspiratorially that she’s seen him looking more than once: it makes him look the very image of his mother, she says when she places it on his head all big brown eyes and crowned in stars. He looks like the prince he is.

Ben hasn’t looked like his mother in a very long time.

-

Rey’s voice cuts through his reverie.

“I’ll do it in the morning, if you like?”

Something inside him twists. “I don’t know that I do like.”

She arches an eyebrow, imperious and dramatic. “I can promise minimal blood loss, if that’s your worry.”

“…it wasn’t, till you said that.”

Smiling, Rey clambers to her feet and moves around behind him. “Well, in the meantime, I know a trick or two. Go back to your fancy writing, I won’t take a minute.”

His shoulders give a little tremor like he’s trying not to laugh as she settles herself behind him and begins to card through his hair with her fingers, her touch both gentle and firm and completely, utterly  _alien_.

When was the last time someone touched him like this? A lifetime ago, or more? When was the last time he had known gentleness?

He remembers…

There’s someone standing before him—he can’t lift his head to see who but a hand presses against his shoulder and in the Force he  _senses_ , and this is a kind of gentleness but it is too much for his raw and wounded psyche to bear so he shuts down, lets the fog draw in around himself and shuts himself behind his walls, and the presence moves gradually away.

Further back, a long and bloody battle has come to its end. Kylo Ren is dying. Her hand is light over his knee, her tears lighter still where they fall on his feet, but he’s too numb: he can scarcely feel her. This is gentleness, and a peace from which there will be no waking, and he welcomes it.

Further still, to the memory of a moment given by the Force itself; her hand reaching out in the darkness, his own reaching back, a memory of fire and warm fingertips against his own as he shivers from the look in her eyes.

Woven through it all a hundred dreams scattered across a thousand nights, dreams of a very different kind of touch—a touch he’s never experienced before, a gentleness that sets him alight to recall now.

_No. Nope. Not there._

“I could teach you that, too, if you like,” Ben offers, launching himself at the nearest distraction that comes to mind. Anything but the thought of  _those_ dreams.

“What?”

“My  _fancy writing_.”

“And what would I do with that knowledge?” Rey asks.

“Whatever you want. It has its uses.”

“Such as?” She finishes finger-combing out his hair and starts to separate parts of it for braiding, her hands deft and sure as they move over his scalp.

It should stir something, he thinks, to have her at his unguarded back like this: it should trigger some kind of  _response_  to have another person sit so squarely in his blind-spot. It might have been a while since he’s faced a threat but that kind of training doesn’t just  _go away._

But—Rey isn’t a threat, and there was a time when she’d protected that back with her own body.

(Her presence stirs something, alright, but it isn’t his reflexes.)

“Well,” he clears his throat again, thinks of cold water; thinks of the discomfort of his pallet bed and the unsettling directness of Alcida-Auka’s flinty stare, anything to distract from the soft pressure of Rey’s hands in his hair and the furnace-warmth of her body at his back. “How’re your saber forms coming along?”

“…what do they have to do with anything?”

 _Thank the stars._  Ben latches onto the question like a drowning man to a life-raft, diving towards decidedly safer waters. “There’s an old branch of martial philosophy that would say, quite a lot.”

“’Martial philosophy,’” she echoes, “is that scholar-speak for thinking with your saber?”

 _Stars._ Ben chokes on a snort. He’d forgotten that there  _are_ no safe waters near Rey.

He can feel his cheeks flaming and only hopes his ears aren’t doing the same thing because there’s no way she’d miss it, this close, her hands working so deliciously through his hair…

“Sorry,” she snickers, without a trace of remorse in her voice.

 _(Menace,_ he thinks.)

“You aren’t entirely wrong,” he says, in as prim a tone as he can manage, because  _one_ of them has to keep this conversation from straying somewhere precarious. “There’s an old school of thought—ancient, actually, it predates the Jedi Order—that holds calligraphy and swordsmanship to be almost sibling disciplines.”

Rey’s hands fall still and he gathers that he’s caught her interest—not a difficult thing when hers is one of the quickest and most eager minds he’s ever encountered, but it’s always felt a little like victory to spark the curiosity of that voracious intellect. “How so?”

“The operative word is  _discipline_ ,” Ben reaches for a fresh sheet of paper and one of the broad-nibbed pens. “Both arts require similar skills of the practitioner—grace, balance, precision, dexterity. One is just…more lethal than the other.”

Her fingertips resume marking lines of fire over his scalp, sending a prickling feeling down his spine. “Alright,” she says, “I’m with you.”

Ben doesn’t think he’s ever been more aware of a fact in his life.

It’s been a long time since he last saw her fight but Ben remembers—Force, he’ll never forget, though he loses all else he’ll hold onto those memories for as long as he lives. She was all instinct and strength, making up for what she lacked in elegance with a ferocity that lent her movements a kind of unrefined grace, brutal as it was (not that he can talk much about brutality, he supposes). It was not, perhaps, the more philosophical approach to combat the Jedi used to espouse, but it was hers: it was how she had learnt to keep herself safe out in the desert, and it served her well. She struck with intent and power, a creature of pure will, and that will flowed through her and into her saberstaff like an extension of her being.

Wondrous.  _Dangerous_.

She begins to weave the hair back from his temple, her fingers working near his left ear.

“There are hundreds of texts written on the subject—I think it was Master Shodo who wrote that through practicing the art of the pen, one could realise the _essential harmony of thought and action,_ and achieve unification of mind and body. By synthesising the two disciplines, and the qualities they demand of adherents, one could become a conduit for the Force, and allow it to simply flow through you.”

He can’t see her, can only feel the slight pressure of her fingers through his hair, but he can picture the attentive expression on her face.

“Keep talking,” she says, “I’m not done.”

“Alright.”

“I’m taking back my offer to cut this, by the way. I’ve changed my mind about it.”

“Why?”

“I like it long. It’s fun to play with, and you don’t look  _that_ awful. Anyway, carry on.”

Ben tries and fails to swallow a grin. What was he talking about, again? “There’s also the element of permanence. Like ink on paper, each stroke of the sword leaves a mark. Each stroke is permanent—and so, therefore, is each mistake. The key is balancing precision with confidence: your hand needs to be decisive enough to make the stroke, but controlled enough to make it  _correctly._ Light enough so as not to bleed through the page, firm enough that you don’t waver. Consider, but don’t hesitate. It follows through into the way of the sword.”

“You remember all that?”

All that, and more. “I used to have some books on the subject,” he admits. “It was…an interest of mine, I suppose.”

There’s a moment of contemplative silence. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Just…having watched you fight…I’m not sure a dainty little pen is what I’d compare you to.”

Ben smiles. She’s not exactly wrong.

But Rey seems to think she might have slipped up. “I mean—Force, I’ve never seen anyone fight like you, with that much power.” She snorts, and oh, now he  _wishes_ he could see her face. “I much preferred having you at my back than fighting you, put it that way. You’re a powerhouse. But you’re hardly  _delicate._ ”

No, the only  _delicate_  thing around here is how nimbly she’s skirting round calling him a bantha in a porcelain shop.

He wasn’t always.

“I didn’t say I adhered to those principles,” he admits.  _Anymore._  “But I used to like the peace of it. The focus. It’s not often done, these days, except for meditation. It’s like…it narrows you down to a single point—like the saber forms, but more for the mind than the body.”

“I can imagine,” Rey exhales heavily. “I used to draw, when I was younger.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah,” he isn’t imagining the thread of sadness in her voice, and once again Ben longs to see her face but he knows she’ll only shove her knee into his spine to keep him still if he tries to turn around. “Not even that much younger, actually. I just…never did, again, after I left Jakku. Never found the time, I suppose.”

Ben hums understandingly. He’s coming to learn, better than most, how time can slip away from you. “You have time now.”

The hands in his hair pause. “I suppose. But my free time will be spent learning fancy sword-writing, no?” She tilts his head back to look down at him with dancing eyes, her own hair falling down around her cheeks. “I want to see if your magic pen tricks make me a better fighter.”

“You’re planning on fighting sometime?”

“Well, no, but…” her expression turns hopeful, “we could give it a go, couldn’t we?”

Oh.

As ever, her ability to put him on the wrong foot is second to none.

He can’t remember how long it’s been since he fought another person, even just as a sparring partner. More than months, now. Years, maybe? There wasn’t much left to fight for, in the end, and he hadn’t  _wanted_ to fight Rey even when they were on opposite sides of the war. It never felt right to stand against her, even before the first time they fought together (and gods, never after). He’s not sure he could, now.

“I mean,” Rey hesitates, “if you wanted.”

Gently, so gently he’s half-convinced he imagines it, one hand trails down through his hair to the nape of his neck where the fine baby hairs lie, and— _tugs_. It sends something hot and shivery shooting straight down his spine, and suddenly Ben can’t remember what objections he had to the idea of being close to her again—to seeing that wildfire spark in her eyes and coaxing it to a blaze; to watching the shift of those powerful muscles in her arms and shoulders, the curling snarl of her rose-pink lips, the sheer  _strength_ in every move she makes—

He bows his head forward again, leaning over the page so she can’t see the steaming blush that’s no doubt  _flaming_ across his cheeks.

_Cold water, thala-siren, oh, hells…_

He only hopes she’s left enough of his hair loose to hide his traitor ears.

“Hey,” Rey says softly, scraping her blunt nails over the back of his neck because apparently Ben isn’t suffering enough already under her attentions, isn’t digging his nails into his own thigh to keep his brain (and other organs) from succumbing to the deadly combination of her light present touch and thoughts of her in battle, fierce and wild and magnificent and—and, oh, he’s in  _trouble_. “Where’ve you gone, there?”

With a supreme effort, Ben pulls himself together. “Nowhere.”

“We don’t have to,” she leans into him, resting her elbows on his shoulders, “spar, I mean.”

Her words take a second to register through the slow sensation of the world dropping away around him. For a few scattered, uneven heartbeats everything is the way he’d described it to her before;  _narrowed down,_ only instead of the pen in his hand and the sheet before him, the point to which the focus of his entire universe has whittled itself down is  _her—_ the warmth of her breath over the top of his head, her hands playing with the ends of his hair, the proximity that’s both utterly new and  _achingly_  familiar.

It’s the nearest he has been to another person in years.

Through the daze of  _Rey,_ he realises she’s waiting for a response.

“It’s been a long time,” he manages, “since I trained with anyone.”

“It’s okay,” she puts her chin on the crown of his head. “I get it. And you’re right, anyway.”

“I am?”

“Yeah,” a faint note of mischief creeps into her voice. “You probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with me, these days, I mean look at you,” she leans over his shoulder, her left arm coming down to gesture at his torso. He’s leaner than he’s ever been, the result of rationing and forgetfulness and a lapsed training regimen, so Ben’s not sure what he’s supposed to be looking at—unless it’s his weakness she’s pointing out. “You’ve gone all soft with nothing to do out here.”

Ben shoves her gently with his shoulder, unable to keep the smirk from pulling at his lips. He knows fine well what she’s doing now, teasing him in a way he hasn’t experienced in what feels like decades—could be, for all he remembers—but she’s not trying to be sly about it, and maybe that’s why it’s working anyway.

“We’ll see,” he mutters.

Rey hums. “You’ve said that before.”

“Have I? When?”

“A long time ago. You wanted something from me, and I wouldn’t give it to you.” Her hands drop from his head to hang over his shoulders, which brings the rest of her into contact with him and  _gods—_ he’s afire with the nearness of her, he’s burning up in the best way possible. He can feel her, the slight weight of her against his back, the steady cadence of her heartbeat through the softness of her chest. “We did see, didn’t we?”

Ben gives a soft huff of laughter.

“We did.”

-

By the fire, that night, Rey struggles to quiet the fear in her heart.

There’s peace, in the soporific rush of the sea; there’s beauty in the faint smeared edge of blue still lingering on the horizon. There’s comfort in looking across the fire to where Ben sits nursing a nightcap of the definitely-not-contraband whisky she’d brought, his hair still up in its little braids; in reaching out into the Force and seeing where his edges have begun to heal, the old wounds bleeding a little less freely into the air.

So what if the price of that peace is memory? So what, if the cost of the future is the past? There was a time when he’d wanted that. Maybe he still does. Maybe this island can give it to him.

Maybe it’s only her.

“I have something for you, too,” Ben says suddenly. Setting his mug aside, he climbs to his feet and without a word disappears into one of the huts—the one Luke had been living in, its durasteel door still only propped in place from when Chewie had kicked it in.

When he emerges, he’s cradling something in his hands.

“What is it?” Rey asks when he returns to her at the fireside, his thumbs tracing circles over the silvery carapace of—

“A compass.” Leaning over, he drops it lightly into her waiting palm, and with deft fingers Rey flips open the casing to investigate its insides. Ben takes his seat again, watching her unravel the little mystery.

It doesn’t take her long.

“Hyperspace routes,” she murmurs, glancing up at him, “it maps hyperspace routes?”

He nods. “The lodestone at its core is attuned to route vectors. In the old days, we used it to locate potential Force-sensitives.”

Realisation dawns on her. “Oh.”

“Take it,” he says, “use it. Find them, if you can.”

She looks down at the silver compass, closes her fingers around it carefully. “What happened to letting old things die? Sith, Jedi, all of it?”

It’s a bit of a cheap shot, and Ben’s expression lets her know exactly what he thinks of it. “I didn’t think we were discussing  _old things_. What happened to something new?”

 _Point_. “Nothing. You—you weren’t wrong, I don’t think, when you said that.”

She hadn’t felt that way at the time. Ben remembers  _that,_ still: the world on fire and a war raging outside among the stars, the fog so thick he could scarcely string a thought together, yet through the smoke and the flames and the sensation of floating six inches over his own left shoulder he’d watched the entire galaxy hang on the edge of a blade, waiting for the slightest breath to knock it one way or the other and send everything toppling down.

(It didn’t have to wait long.)

“Maybe in execution,” Rey continues, her eyes warm with amusement. He’s glad that one of them can smile about it, at least. “But not in theory. It’s long past time for something different.”

Lifting his mug, Ben tips it in her direction, “to something new, then.”

She raises her own, smiling as she does so, a glowing girl with the firelight in her hair and a growing, tentative hope in her eyes, and maybe, just maybe that hope will be enough to reach him, and stay with him for all the days after she leaves.

“Something new.”

-

By the following afternoon the fear has become a living weight, and when the time comes to say goodbye the Force is heavy with the gloom that hangs between them.

“I want to tell you I’ll be on time,” she says, looking down at her hands. She’s wringing them together nervously, her Force signature erratic with anxiety. Ben revels in her nearness while he can. “I want to swear to you that I won’t be late again, but I’ve never been able to keep that promise. I’ve been a terrible handler.”

“I don’t think I can hold you responsible for the fluctuations of the stars, Rey,” he says gently. Struck by a sudden flush of mad courage, emboldened by how freely she’d touched him yesterday, he reaches up to brush his knuckles over her cheek. A thrill runs through him when she allows it, even leans into it like it’s a welcome thing.

“You can hold me responsible for not checking the kriffing calendar,” she mutters, and lifts her blazing eyes to his. “No promises, this time. But I’m coming. I’ll slice that frequency myself. Ping it when it’s time and I’ll try my best to be here. Shout at me through the bond—promise or no promise. Even if I’m late—I  _will_ be here. One way or another.”

Then, to his eternal wonder, she surges up onto her toes and throws her arms around his neck, squeezing him tight. “I swear  _that_.”

Her scent, fresh and sun-warmed and  _Rey,_ envelopes his senses: helpless, Ben can only rest his hands on her hips to hold her steady and breathe her in like it’s the last chance he’ll ever have.

It might be the cruellest thing she’s ever done to him, he thinks, because now he has to figure out how to let her go, and to spend the next term of his isolation with  _this_ as his parting memory of her.

Still, he supposes. There could be worse memories.


	8. Seven

Sometimes, when she thinks of the island, she thinks of the sunlight and the water and the strange creatures that live beneath the waves; sometimes she thinks of the Force, and that bright shining  _connection_ she had felt with everything around her.

Sometimes she thinks of him, and wonders how much of him Nimue will have left for her when she returns.

Whether he’ll remember her at all.

-

“It’s probably a good thing, right?” she asks Leia one evening, when the two women have finally found a chance to catch up. Rey’s been off-world for the past week getting to grips with her new toy, and Leia had been away for much of the fortnight before that: this is the first time they’ve been in the same system since Rey left Ahch-To a month ago, her heart and her gut heavy with unease.

If she thinks about hiding the source of her anxiety from Leia (and she does, because apparently she hasn’t kept enough secrets from those closest to her yet), the idea lasts only so long as it takes for Rey to look Ben’s mother in the eye and realise that Leia is, perhaps, the one person in the galaxy who might comprehend her fears.

There’s no one else she can speak with about this, and if she doesn’t get this weight off her chest soon she fears it might crush her.

Once she starts talking, it’s hard to stop.

“I mean, he’s not coming back, ever,” she continues, frowning at the purple flames dancing in the holographic hearth, and it’s nothing and everything like the place on the island where she could sit and listen to the sound of the sea and the crackle of the fire and feel something inside her touch on peace, but Rey feels the same stillness wash over her, and with it the same inescapable urge to bare herself to her companion.

The only difference that matters between Leia’s apartment and the island is the lack of stars overhead: everything else, from the comfortable quiet swelling between them to the way the older woman can wield an expectant silence to coax utter honesty out of Rey, it’s like sitting with her son again.

(Like at any moment, she’s going to do or say something to completely _embarrass_ herself.)

“He’s on that planet till he dies. He can’t hurt anyone else, but he can’t—can’t  _fix_ anything, either, so maybe—maybe it’s the kinder thing, if it all fades. Maybe it’s better that way.”

“Better,” Leia echoes darkly. Her hands go still where they’ve been busy weaving braids into Rey’s hair. “Kinder, maybe. We all have things we wish we could forget.” She lifts one hand up to knead at her temples where her latest headache has been gnawing away for the past few hours, not so much a new annoyance as a variation on the stress migraine she’s been fending off for days now. They all tend to blend into one, after a while. “Would he wish that?”

“What?” Rey tilts her head to one side, and Leia can’t see her face but she can picture the perplexed look there.

“I don’t know if the son I remember would choose to remember,” she explains softly, “but he isn’t that boy anymore.”

Maybe he never was. Maybe she never knew him, never saw him true.

_Maybe that’s how you lost him._

“You know him, Rey, better than anyone. You know the man he’s become, and the man he could be, and whether that man would even  _want_ to fix anything, if he could. And—I think you have a choice to make, for that.” Leia sighs. “Because maybe it would be kinder to him, to let him forget, but I don’t think it would make him happy, and I don’t think it would be kinder to you.”

“What have I got to do with it?”

Leia smiles. It’s not been so many years since the day the strange young woman had come stumbling down the  _Falcon’s_  ramp onto the tarmac of D’Qar, hurt and shaken and searching so hopefully for belonging—not so many when held up to the years that Leia’s lived, anyway, as many years as losses, it sometimes feels, and yet time still manages to find a way of wringing more out of her.

The girl, who mumbles that her name is  _Rey (“just Rey?” “yeah,”_  and Leia nods agreeably though already she suspects that Rey of Jakku is far from  _just_ anything), is something new: alight in the Force in a way Leia hasn’t seen in  _years,_ her presence burning so fiercely with loneliness and uncertainty and fear, and the grim shade of death in her footsteps.

You learn to sense it in people, after so many years surrounded by bloodshed: it lingers in the air like perfume gone bad; like a shadow with too many limbs, like the circling of carrion birds around the sun. The girl named Rey stands as something new and bright in this war-torn galaxy, threads of fate tangling in her dark hair and the light of the Force in her wild, anxious eyes, but with her hunched shoulders and fists curled tight against her sides she looks more like a cornered animal than a being filled with the sublime energy of the universe. She’s tense. Frightened. Brimming over with a power she can’t begin to understand.

She’s dangerous.

Every rational thought in Leia’s head says that she should be wary; that this is something too unstable, too unquantifiable, to be trusted.

There’s another voice there too, though, and it’s far harder to ignore.

 _One of us_ , it chides, and  _like you,_ and _like him._  From the moment they meet something in Leia reaches out to its echo in Rey, a creature too long starved of the company of its own. _She’s just a girl,_ it croons:  _more than that, so_ much _more, but no less than that, either, alone and afraid and as full of fire as you were at that age. They called you dangerous, then, too._

The quietest voice of all whispers— _death follows you too, Princess. Who are you to turn her away?_

Not so many years, since then, and still Rey hesitates to believe she might be wanted.

“The last time I saw my son, I made him promise me something. I had no right to ask, not after everything that’s been done, but...he agreed. Put up less of a fight than I thought he would, too, and that was what made me sure.”

A dozen burning questions sit on the tip of Rey’s tongue, but only one can make it out first.

“Made you sure of what?” she whispers.

Slowly, Leia starts to unravel the plaits she’s just spent ten minutes braiding until the girl’s hair spreads warm and soft as silk over her hands again. Now she begins a simpler pattern, one that won’t press into Rey’s head when she sleeps.

“He agreed because I told him it would be to your benefit,” she answers at length, going for the simplest answer—which is the truth. “Because I told him it would help you heal.”

Rey’s shoulders tense against Leia’s knees and she can virtually  _see_ the stubborn look that come over the girl’s face, the way it always does when someone suggests she might be something other than invincible.

 _Heal from what?_ Rey wants to ask, mutinous at the very thought that they’d discussed her in such terms. She knows, though. She remembers.

She remembers  _not_  remembering, mostly, in the last months of the war. Too little sleep will do that to you and she’d only been half in her own head to begin with: the bond had dragged the two of them to their wits’ end until the only way they’d been able to snatch even a few meagre hours’ rest had been together, curled up like children in a bed too small for the both of them but wide enough to feel  _vast_ if they were alone; him with his massive body and giant hands he didn’t know what to do with and her with her desert blood that runs so  _cold_ at night proving herself a lot less reticent toward touch when the lights are out, curving herself into the broad planes of him to soak up his body heat like a tooka in the sun. They’d sleep for too brief a time and wake alone, the shadow of the other lingering in the spaces left beside them on the bed.

Then the war is over, and Kylo Ren is not among the officers who surrender but weeks later Ben Solo is brought to Naalol hovering on death’s door, his blood staining Rey’s hands and her clothes and her tear-streaked face as she half-drags him to the medical wing where Leia is waiting.

It’s the two women who save his life, more than the droids or the doctors, and once he sleeps in relative peace they look at one another across his bed and wonder if he’ll ever forgive them for it.

She’d known Ben had spoken with his mother before her, that last night. She hadn’t known what was said—and certainly not that it concerned  _her:_  she just recalls hoping that they’d been kind to each other, there at the end, because it wasn’t a sure thing that he would live and Rey needed, in the midst of all this supposed triumph, to feel just a little bit like something had been won.

“He didn’t need me to tell him that,” Leia goes on. “And he agreed, a lot sooner than I’d expected.”

Something cold burrows its way into her heart. There was another question she should’ve asked first.

“...agreed to what?”

“To give you time,” Leia’s hands settle on her shoulders and squeeze gently. “To give you the space you both needed.”

“To shut me out?” Rey hates how soft, how  _weak_ her voice has become.  _To turn his back on me?_

“He made me the exact same promise you made him,” the grip on her shoulders tugs her gently back to lean against Leia’s legs again. “He wasn’t happy about it, any more than you were, but...” Leia sighs, and the weight of the world is in it, “it’s just one more thing my son will have to forgive me for.”

“How did you know?” Rey murmurs. “That it would help?”

_How did you know it wouldn’t drive us both mad?_

_How do you know it hasn’t?_

“By my own choice, I’ve never known as much of the Force as my brother or my son—or you. I was never able to reconcile with our biological father the way Luke did.” There’s an old wound in her voice, long since scarred over, a coldness that informs Rey of just how little interest Leia has in  _reconciling_ with that part of her heritage. “But I’ve known something of loss, and of healing from it…or trying to.” She squeezes Rey’s shoulders again. “You told me that he’s never been alone in his head. You were isolated by having him in yours—don’t think I didn’t see it, and don’t think I was the only one. Ben is my son, but you—Rey, I wouldn’t have done it if I thought it would hurt you in the long run. You had a chance for peace; for healing, but your connection would’ve compromised it, and it’s not my right to make choices on your behalf but I don’t believe you could’ve made this one on your own. Either of you.”

She sounds so  _weary,_ so utterly tired, and Rey can do nothing but reach up and rest her hands over Leia’s.

“He—Ben—told me it had helped him, his connection to you. That it was you I had to thank for his still being alive—” Leia gives a hollow laugh, because he’d followed that up with  _if you feel like thanking anyone_ and maybe it was only that the ysalamir draped across her shoulders severed their connection to the Force and to each other, but surely he could see in her face that if Rey had been in the room with them Leia would’ve fallen to her  _knees_  before her, would’ve taken her hands and kissed them because her only son was a prisoner and might well be a dead man walking but he wasn’t dead, not yet, and it was because of the girl from Jakku with death in her shadow that he wasn’t lost either, that he was looking at her now with something other than hatred and she could look at him with something like  _hope_. “He told me it had made you both stronger.”

(What Ben had actually said was  _she made me stronger,_ but Leia can feel the enduring tension in the girl’s back and admitting  _that_ might just make Rey bolt for the door, so she holds her tongue for now.)

“And he agreed that it shouldn’t come to a point where that was no longer true.”

Tugging gently on Rey’s hands, Leia coaxes her around and back up to join her on the chaise. She settles there uneasily, one leg bent beneath her, still holding herself like she’s getting ready to run.

Leia understands. She’s never been particularly fond of these  _touchy-feely_  conversations herself; it’s never felt like the most productive use of her time or energies, but Rey has grown adept at hiding herself behind a veneer of boldness and bluster over the past few years and this isn’t exactly something she can share with anyone else. Most of the galaxy had had a hard enough time accepting that Kylo Ren would get to keep his life after the war: even the people that love Rey best would hardly be ecstatic to learn the truth about the  _connection_  that had altered the entire course of it.

“About to go on trial for his life, half the galaxy baying for his blood, and all he could think about was you. Do you see, then, why I asked what I did of him?”

Rey looks down at her hands where they’re folded in her lap, curling her fingers into loose fists around the silver compass. She scarcely parts with the thing anymore. Her brow furrows, her Force signature trembling erratically.

Eventually, she nods.

“And,” Leia hesitates, reaching out to cover the younger woman’s hands with her own, “do you see why, maybe, he wouldn’t choose what you would ask of him?”

Rey bows her head. She closes her eyes, wishing that she didn’t see—that she  _couldn’t_ understand, but she does and she can, and she can’t resent Leia for it now.

It’s not the forgetting that’s the worst part: she knows that. It’s the  _knowledge_  that there are spaces, absences where memory should be, that parts of you are incomplete and you don’t know  _which_. For fifteen years she lived with the knowledge of that absence, filling the hollow inside her with dreams of a thousand longed-for futures rather than face the truth of her abandonment. She might’ve gone her whole life clinging to that lie, but Ben had made her remember.

He’d made her confront the past, made her face the truth and break the chains that held her and it had  _hurt_ —and a part of it still does—but she hasn’t felt like her heart is breaking in two because of it in a long time, yet when she thinks of the choice she would make for him now she starts to feel it splinter again.

This isn’t a debt she can live with. This isn’t a choice she can make.

She’ll tell him, and if he rejects her after that—if he doesn’t  _want_ to remember—well, that’s his right, and it’s the risk she’ll have to take.

He’ll have his chance to forget, again, once she’s gone.

-

It’s been close to two years since the island became his home, and in that time Ben had thought he’d seen all of it.

Or—almost all of it. There’s one place he still won’t stray near, waiting for  _something_ to tell him when the time is right, trusting in the Force to guide him there when the day comes. But he’d thought he could find his way around the rest of it with his eyes closed, given that exploringis one of the few activities freely available to him.

So it’s a little unnerving to find himself in a part of Nimue he’s never seen before, staring up at the blackened husk of a dead tree thrust up from the ground.

No—not dead, not quite. Something green catches his eye, down among the long grasses that choke the burnt-out knot of wood at its base.  _Something_ is growing again, carving out a kind of life from the charred bones of the tree.

The air shifts, the Force gathering around him.

_Never alone for long._

“What happened here?” he asks of the new presence in the quiet.

“A lesson, I think,” his uncle comes to stand beside him, allowing enough space between them that even the faint light he exudes doesn’t touch Ben. “Something to do with letting old things lie, so new things might be made from them, and that nothing can be built on nothing.” Luke walks forward, reaching out to rest one hand against the trunk. “History shouldn’t be a prison, but a foundation. It’s taken me too long to understand that running from the past is no different to carrying it with you. I wish I hadn’t forced such a lesson on you, too.”

Skywalker’s ability to flay him raw with just a few words is almost unparalleled.  _Almost._

“Me too.”

Swallowing down the heart that’s trying to climb up his windpipe, Ben turns to walk away.

The ghosts watch him go.

-

He misses her.

She’d been so quiet last time, as she was leaving; so thoughtful and sad, gazing about her like she was trying to memorise the island and everything on it. Like she thought she might not be back.

She might not, he supposes. She can hardly do this forever.

The thought makes his heart squeeze uncomfortably, an unpleasant feeling stirring in his gut as Ben realises that till now he hadn’t imagined a future where she wouldn’t.

 _What,_ the unease turns quickly to scorn in his mind,  _did you think that she would be willing to drop everything and traipse across the galaxy twice a year for the rest of her life, just to come and make sure an exile hasn’t starved? Why would she?_

_Why would anyone?_

(For the longest time he hadn’t imagined a future at all, pulled too many ways between the warring threads of fate to believe a thing like  _life_ might come after, but in those rare moments when there seemed to be somethingon the far shore—something other than the dark water in which he fought to stay afloat, there had been _someone_ there too, and it felt like her.)

_You are here to be forgotten, no matter what the Force has to say. You were put here to die. Her life is no longer bound to yours, and you have no one else to blame but yourself for it._

Maybe she’ll find someone else to come in her place, someone who owes her a favour, perhaps. Hells, it needn’t even be a person. A  _droid_ could do what she does, and Ben isn’t sure why they didn’t just give him a few decades’ worth of supplies from the start and leave him.

There’s a part of him that wishes they would—that _she_ would. That way, at least, he’ll be free to forget.

It wars with the larger part of him, which fears it won’t feel much like freedom at all.

-

One clear night, the bond brings her to Nimue and deposits her by the shore.

Ben must be somewhere nearby, but she can’t see him: there’s only the darkness, the cliffs and the beach and the moonlight on the sea.

The island looms over her like a sleeping giant, patient and watchful. Rey glares up at it, full of an irrational anger at the crags silhouetted against the stars.

 _You can’t have him,_ she thinks.  _I won’t let you._

The waves roll up over the shore and they sound like laughter in her ears, low and endless and echoing all around the little cove. Rey shivers, wrapping her arms around her waist, and scowls more fiercely into the night.

 _So,_ that great expanse of sound and hunger seems to taunt her, licking around her ankles like it would drag her down into the freezing depths and spit back her bones onto the sand like driftwood,  _so come and fight me for him._

-

It’s in his dreams now. Before, at least, he could sleep and be free of it, because his nightmares were usually so full of screaming that anything else didn’t stand a chance of being heard.

Now, though, he’s begun to know the peace of a dreamless sleep for the first time in his life, and the violence of the terrors has been replaced by something else—the calling of a hundred thousand voices, low and insistent as the breath of the sea, singing to him out of the shadows. They know his name,  _all_ of his names; the names he has cast aside and fled from, the names he would forget, the names that have never truly felt like his own no matter how many times he whispered them to himself in the night like a prayer, like a mantra, like a shield to hold off the shadows that had new names waiting for him in the dark.

_Lord Ren…Kylo…Ben…_

_Ben…Ben…_

Only in her voice does it feel like a name he wants to answer to: in the crooning sigh that rises from the void under the island the sound of it fills his throat with nausea and something far too lose to fear.

Why?

There’s nothing to be afraid of down there. Rationally, he knows that—that there’s nothing to fear in the cave, nothing evil or truly malign, that the wellspring of the Force in its heart is only  _dark_ insofar as it is not  _light._ He knows the words for what they are—and what they aren’t: like some great shoreless ocean, the dark gathers where the light cannot reach, in depths greater and more profound than can be seen from the surface. There’s nothing innately corrupt or cruel or wicked about it.

It’s not  _wrong_. It just…is.

And still he’s recoiled from it, for as long as he’s been here. Recoiled from the dark the way he once shunned the light, and probably just as vainly too.

Now it offers him understanding: it offers the truth. It offers what he has lost.

Why does he reject it? His inheritance? His  _birthright?_

 _Soon,_ he thinks, hopes something in the hungry silence of the island can hear him.

_I will come to you soon._

-

“You were right,” Rey says, flipping the compass between her hands. She’s been up for most of the night charting new routes with it, inputting them into the _Falcon’s_ computer to prepare for her next trip across the stars.

“I’m right about a lot of things,” Leia smiles, “and wrong probably twice as often, so you’ll need to be specific.”

Rey’s entire weight thumps down onto the chair across from her, a distracted light in her eyes. “Well, yeah, a few things, actually. But something you said—and something _he_ said—gave me an idea. I might need your help with something…”

-

“Wait, so does this mean you’re starting a new Jedi Order after all?” Finn leans across the table toward her, features alight with excitement as he raises his voice slightly to make himself heard above the noise. Rey can’t hold back a grin.

“No, not quite. I was thinking of something different.” She mirrors his closeness, leaning in conspiratorially. Around them, the muted clamour of a Coruscanti street carries on unheeding, more colour and sound and  _life_ in one short stretch of pavement than Rey had encountered in fourteen years before the day she ran into Finn. While she looks at him, chewing on her lip as though she hasn’t decided whether or not to disclose her  _secret plans_ even though she knows full well she won’t get them off the ground without him _,_ she thinks of the words of the old Jedi codes.

_Attachments._

As if she would ever  _choose_ to give hers up.

“Something new.”

-

There’s something different about the island, lately. It’s always felt faintly  _watchful_ , alive with the energy of the Force—or maybe it’s just the caretakers, who he swears have been keeping a closer eye on him since he pulled that hut down, waiting for their chance to be rid of him.

This place is aware in a way he’s only ever felt once or twice before, climbing the steps of the ziggurat on Malachor, or navigating the necropolis of the Valley of the Dark Lords. It’s a strange, sleepy kind of sentience, as if Nimue were some dozing behemoth half-submerged beneath the sea paying only slight attention to the insignificant lifeforms on her back, and after so many years with other more intrusive watchers in his mind it’s almost  _comforting_.

Now, though, it’s like she’s woken up.

Either that or he’s finally going mad. He sees the ghosts of the island’s past almost every day now, glimpses of its future, and sometimes he knows the faces it shows him—Skywalker, figures out of holocrons from his youth at the temple—but mostly they’re the unfamiliar shadows of the ancient Jedi, going about their lives more than a thousand years ago. It’s like having people around again, only none of them can see or hear him, and Ben finds he doesn’t mind it so much.

If there’s a conscious thought behind the memories he’s shown it must be inordinately fond of Rey, because she’s never doing anything significant when he sees her, anything that someone (besides him) might look at and think  _yes, this moment should endure forever_.

A part of him has begun to keep a catalogue of her appearance in those moments, the length of her hair and the cut of her clothes, not daring to imagine when they might happen—because for her to be here in the future, she’ll have to  _be here_ in the future, and the thought is too tempting and too impossible to even dwell on.

 _Dangerous,_ he tells himself.

He dreams of her, too.

Ben rises in the dark one night to find her sitting cross-legged on the promontory, her back to him and her face tilted up to the stars. She doesn’t stir as he steps out into the cold to join her.

“I keep looking for it, up there,” she says. “Jakku. Where we are, it shouldn’t be visible, and still—I can’t help it. I keep looking back…wondering if anything’s changed. I don’t know why. Nothing ever did.”

He frowns. “You miss it?”

Rey closes her eyes, a slow sigh passing through her whole body.

“Yes. No. I don’t know. It was all I ever knew, until a few years ago. Sometimes I feel like I carry it with me, and all I need to go back there is close my eyes. I don’t know if you can miss that.”

“How did you survive?” She looks so young, so slender and fine in the silver light, he forgets what she has endured. “On your own for so long?” Ahch-To is hardly desolate and yet sometimes he feels like he can’t bear it.

“You saw how I survived,” she looks down at her hands in her lap. “You saw all of me.”

Ben takes a deep breath.

“Is that why I feel like I know you?” he asks quietly, “from years ago…for all my life. I’ve always felt like I’ve known you forever, but it hasn’t been that long, has it?”

He’s never been able to admit it, but here under the stars, in the safety of his dreams, he wonders.

“No,” she replies, “not that long. But I saw you, before we ever met. I saw you in dreams, and I think you saw me too. But…mostly, you just know me.”

He pulls back a little, mulling over her words.

“Are you happy?” she asks suddenly.

Ben considers. “I suppose. It’s quiet.”

“Yeah. I remember you saying you wanted quiet.” She looks down again. “I shouldn’t really be talking to you. I made a promise.”

So did he, he thinks. It was important, and yet—he can’t remember why.

“It’s alright,” Ben assures her anyway, “we’re only dreaming.”

Rey looks a little heartbroken at that. She takes a deep breath, looking back out across the sea. “Yeah,” she says softly. “Just dreaming.”

And because he’s only dreaming, he feels safe enough to tell her—

“I miss you.”

A look of such naked vulnerability comes over her face, and he wonders if anyone’s ever told her that.

He thinks he might have heard those words before, somewhere.

“Me too,” Rey whispers, “and I’m sorry. I never meant for you to be alone so long.”

Ben frowns. “It’s not your fault.”

She hangs her head, shakes it lightly so her hair falls down around her face and she’s hidden from him. “It’s completely my fault.” She can’t hide the tremor in her voice, though.

“Rey—”

“Don’t,” she cuts him off, reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear. Now he can see her eyes, and they shine with more than the moonlight. “Don’t be kind.”

Ben blinks, flummoxed.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been kind,” he says eventually. _Not the way you deserved._

_You made me want to be, though._

_You made me want to be so much._

She still does.

Rey lifts her sad, lovely eyes to his. “You had your moments,” she tells him, a little smile playing over her lips.

Suddenly she’s moving. Uncurling her legs from beneath her, she slides off the rock and closes the distance between them to slip her hand into his. Wordlessly Ben lets her lead him back inside the cave, to where she gestures that he lie down on his nest of blankets as she folds herself into a kneeling position beside it. Ben sinks slowly down into the softness, gathering the covers about himself. He keeps an eye on her, just in case she disappears, but Rey surprises him by lying down beside him and resting her head on her forearms to keep her gaze level with his.

She must be cold, flat out on the cave floor, but then—do dreams feel the cold?

The shadows pool beneath her open eyes. “Sleep, Ben,” she says, voice muffled by her arm.

Obediently, Ben shuffles himself further down until he can lie flat, and it should be enough that she’s beside him while he drifts away to sleep again but it isn’t—he’s always been a selfish man and he’ll always want more, always take a mile for every inch he’s offered—and so he reaches out a hand and rests it carefully on her back, settling his thumb into the slight indent of her spine. She sighs, her body relaxing under his touch. It makes his heart thump to feel it, to have her close again.

Now he sleeps, the dream of her warm under his hand.

-

Leia Organa is a hair’s breadth away from grabbing a hapless young man by his lapels and hoisting him aloft with her bare hands, and if she does, Rey’s not breathing a word.

“Alright,” Leia approaches the trembling comms officer with all the patient menace of an apex predator scenting blood. “I’ll try to use small words, so as to avoid confusing you: I  _know_  you have a job to do. You’ve informed us of this. But as I’ve already informed you—as my  _aide_ has informed you, as my aide’s  _droid_ has informed you—the life of an important political prisoner is on the line here. I realise that this sounds unlikely to you, and that’s fine, but I really need you to know that I don’t give a damn.” She taps her fingers on the console, jerking her head back to where Rey waits by the door.

“Now, hand over the frequency, or it’s the Jedi’s turn to ask.”


	9. Eight

The water glints where it catches the light, the ocean turned to beaten silver in the sun.

It’ll be midwinter, soon.

He doesn’t count the days anymore.

-

The fourth full moon since summer’s end has begun to wane when he shuffles into the storage hut to dig out the comm unit. He hasn’t touched it till now—who would he speak to? Who would answer? He’s still not entirely convinced there’ll be someone listening on the other end; it feels like an exercise in false hope to ping the frequency the unit’s set to and he doesn’t wait around to be proven wrong.

A week passes with no response, and Ben wonders that a part of him had even dreamed someone might answer.

-

There’s a storm gathering over the sea, a bruise-coloured mass hunkered low in the southern sky. It was there at dawn and by late afternoon it’s loomed up to cover the island, swallowing up the suns and casting the whole world into a gloom of premature twilight. The winds have picked up, the temperature plummeting as the waves begin to whip up against the cliffs.

Ben glares up at the brooding thunderheads from where he’s crouched beside the fire, stoking the heat to get his supper on before the deluge hits.

He’s heating up the remains of yesterday’s hyacander chowder when, over the merry crackle of the flames and the distant rumble of the storm, he hears the sound of a distorted voice calling his name from the supply hut.

He strides into the hut, answering the hail with a curt, _“what?”_

“…Ben?”

Too late, the familiarity of the voice registers.

“Mother.”

“Oh. Good to know that snot-nosed kid wasn't talking out of his ass. Ben—” his mother’s voice turns suddenly serious. “Tell me. How long?”

“What?” he repeats blankly, shaken to be hearing her voice after so long and with  _no_ warning.

“How many  _days,_ Ben?”

“Oh. Uh.” He thinks. He thinks _hard_. He’d been going by  _moons,_ not days. “I don’t know. Nearly five months, or so?”

“Good. Right.” Leia seems to remember suddenly that she’s speaking to the son she hasn’t seen in years, and her brusque manner falters. “Are you alright?”

He frowns. “I’m fine.”

“Ben. Please. Don’t lie. I neither need nor deserve my feelings spared. Are you well?”

“I’m not—I mean, I’m fine,” gods, has he forgotten how to speak, too? “I just...why are you—what do you want?”

He and his mother don’t speak. He hasn’t seen her since the day they locked him up. Before that, he had burnt his bridges to the ground and done his best to salt the ashes.

“Rey said she’d told you to check in, but the comms office passed nothing on so we commandeered the frequency. Apparently their definition of ‘emergency’ doesn’t cover you starving to death out there. Anyway...” Leia clears her throat, “I’ll be on the other end of this, and your supply drop will be with you as soon as I can clear a pilot.”

Ben considers just hanging the thing up, but her words make him pause.

_Pilot?_

It slips out before he can stop it.

“Is Rey…?”

Leia sighs, sounding faintly exasperated.

“She’s fine. She’s away. Upped and left a few days ago, otherwise she’d probably be on her way to you already, but it looks like it’ll be someone else this time.”

Oh.

“Ben?”

He doesn’t know what he says in response, what his mother says in farewell or even if he returns it. Ben lets the handset drop, unheeding of where it lands.

The first spots of rain are just starting to splatter out of the black sky when he leaves the hut, numb but utterly unsurprised. The Force moves darkly around him, coiling in the clench of his fists and the sting in his corners of his eyes.

She’s not coming.

-

By midnight there can’t be much water left in the clouds but still the downpour continues, falling and falling until the cliffs are turned to waterfalls and there isn’t a hut in the village that isn’t leaking either from the ceiling or the door, and Ben wonders that the island and everything on it hasn’t been washed into the sea yet.

It wouldn’t be the biggest loss.

The storm is only just reaching land: for the past few hours he’s looked out over the ocean to watch the blue-white veins of lightning split the sky, flinching each time with the memory of past punishments but refusing to turn away from it. There’s a part of him that will always baulk from lightning, just as there’s a part of him that will forever shy from green light, but Ben isn’t afraid—not of anything, not anymore. There’s nothing left to be afraid  _of_. He’s alone now, for good, the young boy curled in the dark with his shadows and his voices and this time there’s no one coming to chase them away, no one to run their hands through his hair and hold back the long night with soft words and gentle touches, but the night has been his home for so long that he no longer fears it: it’s a part of him, as much as breath and blood and bone, and like the blood on his hands, he will never get it out.

(He does not want to get it out.)

 _Rey, Rey, Rey,_ he mumbles her name to himself. It would’ve been kinder if his mother had simply chosen not to contact him, had let him go on believing that Rey would be back. He’s gone far longer than five months telling himself that, before.

Maybe she’s just finally gotten bored of playing handler to him and decided to hand over the duty to someone else; because that’s what it was, after all: her  _duty_.

He forgets sometimes, that he is not here of his own free will—the lack of bonds and guards or walls around him make it easy to lose sight of his confinement. He forgets, too, that Rey’s visits have more to do with ensuring he doesn’t starve in the Republic’s custody than her personal wants, that more than likely she’s been doing this for his mother out of some perceived sense of debt.

 _A prison’s a prison,_ he recalls her saying once, and Ben had thought he understood it then—that he knew what it meant to carry his chains with him everywhere he went, but it’s only now that he sees the true isolation of his future spread out ahead of him like the star-map to a barren galaxy: the  _nothingness_  that is all he has to look forward to in this life.

So many years spent fighting to erase the past and fulfil the destiny of his bloodline and here, now, the future is as empty as he could wish it to be, a blank page upon which anything might be written.

It’s only cost him everything.

Ben clenches his fists. With every stray doubt and fear that creeps into his heart, the song of the dark grows louder.

 _She couldn’t do this forever,_ he tells himself.

All at once, the idea of sitting still for a second longer is enough to make him want to tear his skin off and dive headfirst into the sea.

In the old days he would call his lightsaber to him and pour out all his fury and fear and  _hurt_ into his training, but his blade is gone and his driftwood sword is a _toy_ in comparison and it’s all he can do now to press the heels of his hands to his temples and grit his teeth against the white-hot  _burn_ of the dark scoring trails of fire through his veins, calling to him, beseeching,  _begging_ for him to let it in again.

It’s a familiar path, bordered all about with bitterness and resentment and hate, and Ben has walked it so many times in his life he wonders that he ever thought he could've done otherwise.

_You belong to the dark. No matter the path you walk, you will always end up back here: you always have._

He  _misses_ it.

He sits straighter, squinting into the night.

There’s something moving out there in the dark—a figure, a  _person,_ walking with quick determined steps down toward the north side of the island, where Nimue’s unforgiving cliffs give way to gently-sloping inclines mottled with tidal pools and inlets, the whole shoreline riddled with sea-caves and little beaches swallowed up by the high tide.

Down on that coastline, the wellspring waits.

Something tugs at the place beneath his breastbone, a thread wrapped around his ribs pulling him inexorably down to the water. The night is alive, wild with salt-scented wind and the brindled stormclouds and the song of the Force all around: it calls, sweetly, ceaselessly, and Ben has run out of reasons to deny it.

_What do you want with me?_

Wordlessly, his eyes tracking the progress of the shadowy figure so his feet can follow her, he gives in to the call of the dark.

-

She’s standing on the edge of the sea when he finds her, framed by the surging white crests of the waves as she gazes down at something below her.

Ben’s foot plunges into a rockpool in his haste to catch up and she spins, staring over her shoulder—he freezes in alarm, leg still poised in mid-air above the water, and he knows—he  _knows_ she can’t see him, can’t hear him, but some mad impulse makes him want to call out to her anyway, just to find out if somehow he’d been wrong, if maybe—

Rey turns back, finding herself alone, and Ben watches her sink to a crouch and slip down over the little ledge without a sound.

Of course she can’t see him. She’s not really here. This moment happened a long time ago, before he ever came to the island, and it would take more than wishing to reach back into the past and pull on the threads of time—even in a place like this, where time moves at its own pace and words like  _past_ and  _present_ and  _future_ hold little meaning; where the years bending in upon themselves leave echoes scattered across space like ripples on the surface of a lake.

She  _was_  here, once. Ben can feel her frustration in the air, her search for the truth and her resolve that if no one will give it to her then she’ll just have to find it for herself. Years ago she came here, and the memory of her remains: he walks in her shadow, following her across the stars the way he always has, caught in her wake and drawn along without even knowing it. Even before he knew her name his path was leading him to her, his destiny and hers drawn together by the will of the Force, their disparate fates made one. He’s just following in the footsteps she’s left for him now, following wherever she and this damned island would have him go.

He jumps down over the rocky shelf and hunkers down beside the edge of the pit, gazing over the brink into that salt-scented dark that echoes with the muffled roar of waves against the stone.

His fingers stroke through something soft and brittle, a ragged fringe of seaweed clinging to the rim of the vent in the rock, dark feathery leaves that gleam black as blood in the moonlight. It cushions his knees as he leans forward over the abyss and peers within.

The mirror whispers up to him from below, promising answers, promising the  _truth._ It’s right there beneath him. All he has to do is jump.

Barely conscious of his own movements, Ben strips himself of shirt and boots and leans back over the edge.

The hand he rests gently on the seaweed curls into a fist.

 _Alright,_ he thinks grimly.  _Alright, fine. Let’s do this now._

He tips himself forward and dives headfirst into the void.

-

The cold slams into him like a hammer-blow, forcing the air from his lungs in a rush of bubbles as he struggles against the weight of the water. He’s sinking, pulled down into the deep by the strength of the current, the tide wrapping like hands around his ankles to drag him down, down, down into the sightless dark.

Above, the faintest smear of grey light dances on the surface of the water, a shivering blur of light receding into the distance as the edges of his vision start to turn black.

He’s going to drown.

-

The waters we know as the Silver Sea get their name from how they look under the moonlight, from the way the pale sands of the bay reflect the night sky’s argent luminescence and cast all the world in shades of ink and stardust. By day those waters are a deep, purplish indigo, mirroring the colour of Chandrila’s sunlit skies.

The breakers lap playfully at Ben’s ankles as he grasps his parents’ hands, lets them half-tow him out into the shallows.

 _One—two—three!_ Their voices thread together, their grip tightening on his wrists to swing him up out of the water, a bright peal of laughter bursting free from him when his flailing legs send water spraying in crystalline arcs through the air.

He’s so small here—he was only young when they left their home on Chandrila to follow the Senate to Hosnian Prime, so the stars only know how many years it’s been since today.

There won’t be so many days like this one, once Leia’s position calls them off-world.

(There weren’t so many to begin with, and yet his earliest years always seem to shine a little brighter than the rest, touched with a lightness and freedom from the shadows that would come after.)

“Go to your mom, now,” Han’s got the boy under the armpits to keep him afloat above the waves; they barely come up to his waist but Ben’s kicking feet can only just scrape the bottom and it might as well be the open ocean to a child of his size, miles and miles of nothing but water all around him and only those hands between him and the depths. “C’mon, you ready? She’ll catch you.”

“Ready,” Ben splutters, and launches himself from his father’s arms.

The short span of feet between leaving one parent and crashing headlong into the other feels like miles—he loses sight of Leia when the foaming water rises up around his ears, cutting off the sound of her voice encouraging him onward. He squeezes his eyes shut and takes a deep breath just in case his head goes under but in doing so gets a mouthful of salt and _chokes,_ gasping for breath as the sea comes flooding in—he’s flailing, sinking, slipping helpless beneath the water, the dark waves closing over his head—

—hands wrap firmly around his upper arms, a strong grip tugging him up and through the weight of the water Ben hears his mama’s voice, as clearly as if she’s speaking in his head.

_“Swim, now, come on!”_

Frantic, he kicks out, clawing at the water to propel him closer to his mother as his father’s hands support him, reaching with both arms for that shivering glimpse of light above him where the silvered Chandrilan sun beats down on the surface of the sea—only when he tears through the water into the cold air again it’s not the lavender-blue skies of Hanna Bay that greet him but the chilly green-tinged darkness of the cave, alone but for the echoes, and the ghosts that wait for him on the shore.

-

They’re all here with him.

He can see them, standing at either side of him in the glass, their gazes heavy on his shoulders where he shivers on the rocks. He knows them—all of them, their faces, their names, the weight of their lives and their deaths.

His father, his uncle, his grandmothers; the entire miserable Skywalker line, and beyond them the others—the young faces of people he knew once, a long time ago, borne up out of the past, all of them watching in silence as Ben clambers to his feet and stumbles toward the mirror.

Lifting one hand, he presses it against the glass.

His father meets his stare.

“Dad,” Ben chokes out.

It’s the shift in the Force that draws his attention, more than the sudden gleam of phosphorescent blue light over his shoulder.

He knows, even before he looks up, who it is that he’ll find there.

Ben’s never seen the man standing beside him now, doesn’t recognise the soft curls that fall around his sharp cheekbones or the scar that neatly bisects his eye, but he knows him, as surely as he’d known the other faces in the mirror—as surely as he’d known the call of the dark, had felt it answer something deep in his own blood.

That same _something_ gazes back at him out of Anakin Skywalker’s weary gaze, those blue eyes haunted with grief and all they’ve seen.

“Grandfather…” Ben breathes.

“Ben.”

This moment—he’s waited for it for what feels like an entire lifetime, and yet when he opens his mouth to speak all that comes out is—

“Why?”

His voice is hoarse, plaintive. A child’s voice, small and full of hurt.

 _Why didn’t you come? When I called—when I_ begged? _Why did you wait so long? Why didn’t you answer?_

“I couldn’t,” Anakin says heavily. “I…I wasn’t able.” He steps forward, closing the distance between them as though he would reach out, but his hands stay folded in the sleeves of his robe. “I would’ve done anything— _given_ anything—to be able to reach you. Believe me. I would’ve done anything to help you.”

He shakes his head bitterly. “I know that means nothing to you. I know I wasn’t there, but it’s true. I’ve been with you, Ben, even when you couldn’t see me. I have burned with you, every day.”

Anakin Skywalker had burned, decades ago on the scorched ground of Mustafar, and he had lived through that agony again to watch the darkness consume his bloodline.

Ben is shaking.

“Why couldn’t you reach me?” he whispers.

_What was wrong with me? What made it so that I was beyond the light, even then?_

He knows, even before Anakin answers.

“Snoke.”

Ben bows his head. He has been free of Snoke for years, now. “And after?”

Free of the creature himself, if not the spectre of him.

“I didn’t think I had the right,” his grandfather murmurs. In the mirror, he looks away, blue eyes burning into the darkness. “You were free to listen, but how could I speak? How could I counsel you when I’d fallen so much further? How could I even think of reaching out?”

“I wish…” Ben falters. “I wish you had.”

To have had someone who knew, who _understood_ …

“I know. And—I am sorry. More sorry than I can ever say.”

He closes his eyes. “I am too.”

“But to see you on the path to peace—to balance…” Anakin sighs. “I wouldn’t do anything to risk that.”

Ben doesn’t feel at peace. He doesn’t feel _balanced._ He feels like there are fault lines inside him, hurts so old and settled in the marrow of him that to reopen them now might break him to pieces.

It might, but that doesn’t have to mean an ending.

In the dark his reflection distorts. Like looking into the rippling water, his face begins to smear all down one side until they aren’t his anymore: Ben stares at the place where his features blur into those of his grandfather—ghost and man, living and dead, past and present becoming one in the clouded heart of the mirror to show him, in the twisted remains of their reflections, the future that waits on the other side of the night.

_This is what you will become._

This is what waits for him: this is the fate that lies at the end of this path.

He will be like his grandfather; like Anakin, like Vader.

Alone.

_This is what awaits you._

“It doesn’t have to be,” Anakin is at his side again, one hand resting on his shoulder. Ben feels it like a faint warmth through his soaked shirt. “You can break the cycle. That doesn’t have to be your path.”

“How?” _It’s too late. Years too late. This is the only path left now._

“Change it.”

_“How?”_

The ghost tightens his grip. “You know how.”

Ben takes a deep breath. He does, but it terrifies him to think of and so he turns to the others—the ghosts whose faces still burn at his insides, the words clawing their way up his throat to linger like the taste of bile on the back of his tongue.

_Change it._

There’s a dull roar in his ears, the sensation of time itself loosening its hold on the island—time has no meaning here, past and present and future interweaving till there’s no separating what has gone before with what will come after, no telling them apart because all of it, _all of it_ is now, there are thousands of years unfolding in the span of heartbeats and the island’s entire history is writing itself out on the cave’s slick walls, and maybe there’s no undoing what Ben has done or what’s been done to him but there are other ways to escape the past than burning it to the ground, and he knows it now.

Sometimes all it takes to kill the monster is to speak its name.

He looks up to meet his father’s gaze again.

 _“I’m sorry,”_ he whispers.

Han nods, and reaches up to flatten his own hand against Ben’s.

“Me too, kid.” His mouth twitches, that same sad tiny smile he’d worn in the last moments of his life coming over it. “I love you. And—I’m with you.”

Ben bows his head, squeezing his eyes shut against the onslaught of tears.

 _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,_ he says until the words have become a breath, misting on the glass next to his lips.

When he opens his eyes again the ghosts have faded, save for one, and out of the shadows another slighter figure is emerging.

In the midst of this impenetrable darkness, a tiny splinter of light takes root.

_Rey._

She was here, before. She still is, he can see her—he can feel her all around, the mirror reflecting her lovely face back at him a thousand times over, scores of solemn-eyed girls watching him from out of the past.

Wordlessly, she lifts her hand like his father had done, and rests her palm against his.

“Rey,” he whispers. Moved by something more than conscious will, he inches forward until he can touch his forehead to the mirror. He keeps his eyes open, holding her stare as her left hand comes up to rest beside the right. He mirrors the movement in silence, flattening his other hand against hers. They’re so close now he could feel her breath on his lips, if she were real.

If any of this were real.

Her hand stays flat against his for a moment longer, and then the fog clouding the glass begins to curl and dissipate around her, her features turning to smoke until Ben is left alone.

No—

Not alone. Not quite. Anakin is still here, watching him.

“What…” Ben sounds like a pleading child but he can’t bring himself to care. His grandfather waits, lets him gather the words together. “What was real? Will you tell me? What he said—what I _saw_ , in my head, all of it…what was real?”

Anakin nods, and his face is lined with regret and sorrow but there’s _hope_ there too, and compassion, and something that might be love.

(Might, because it’s been so very long since he last saw it in another’s eyes that Ben realises he’s forgotten what it looks like, can only guess at the name of that soft light in his grandfather’s gaze.)

It’s that, more than anything, that breaks him; that reaches its burning hands inside to the place in his chest where his heart beats swift as the rain, to find the shatterpoints of the fractured self within and tear them open.

Kylo Ren and Ben Solo and everything he’s ever been, heir to the light and scion of the dark, last of the Skywalker line and inheritor of all the glory and pain and _blood_ that goes with it—it burns through him now, everything he has spent years trying to run from or destroy surging up through him in a dizzying rush that sends him to his knees. He crumples, overcome, and his grandfather and the ghosts and the Force itself are here to bear witness to his unmaking but Ben no longer cares who sees him come apart.

A hand closes over his shoulder, warm fingers gripping him to tether his fraying mind to the earth, but the waters are rising up around him and the roaring of the ocean is loud in his ears, and when it takes hold of his body and lifts him from the ground Ben can’t find it in himself to fight it.


	10. Nine

**Naalol, three years ago**

She slips into the room without a sound, letting the door slide closed behind her. Kylo doesn’t look up.

He’s not used to being near her and not being able to _feel_ her. To not being able to feel _anything._

It feels a little like peace.

It feels a little like suffocating.

“I hate it,” mutters Rey, “that thing.”

She’d never even heard of ysalamiri until today. She wishes she’d never had to.

(They tell her she needn’t go near the Force-nullifying field the creature projects, but she has to see _him,_ to offer a goodbye or beg his forgiveness or tell him...well, she doesn’t know what she’d tell him, and so—and so.)

Kylo says nothing, staring at the same wall he’s been lost in since his mother left the cell, his chest aching with the memory of the wound he’d thought might kill him.

(Thought. Hoped.)

“Ben?” Rey’s still hovering by the door. There’s an uncharacteristic note of trepidation in her voice and he hates it. It sparks his temper—which, truthfully, has been searching for a target against which to burn itself out since the moment he regained consciousness.

“Why am I here?” he asks quietly.

Behind him, Rey bites her lip.

She knows what he’s asking. Not _why am I a prisoner,_ or _why did you hand me over to the ones who want me dead,_ but _why am I alive?_

_Why did you heal me?_

_Why didn’t you let me die?_

Why had she gone to such lengths to haul him back from the brink of death, when he’d asked her to let it take him?

She hadn’t known, at the time. She still doesn’t.

(She tells herself that, anyway.)

“I couldn’t,” is all she says, and hopes she doesn’t look half so lost as she feels when he turns to glower wearily at her.

“I struggle to believe that I’m worth more alive,” he says, low and bitter and _cold._ “There are bounties on my head from Coruscant to Wild Space.”

Rey shrugs, looks away from him. “Maybe I wasn’t interested in collecting.”

“Maybe you thought dying would be too easy.”

Her gaze snaps back to his, suddenly fierce. “No,” she says curtly, and moves across the room to put herself before him. Her eyes flash angrily. “I just couldn’t _sit there_ and _watch it happen_.”

“You didn’t have to watch.”

 _“Didn’t I?”_ she snarls, and she wants to go on—to say _I’m in your head and you’re in mine. Would you have liked it—to have felt half of you die, to feel the bond go cold inside you while you did nothing to stop it? Would_ you _have been able to do it?_

But she doesn’t, because she already knows the answer, and she doesn’t think she can bear to hear it spoken aloud.

“Please,” she says instead, and if it shades a little too close to begging for her liking then maybe it’s only a fair exchange for the naked vulnerability in his brown eyes.

He’s afraid. Of course he is. She brought him here while he was unconscious and handed him over to the enemy, who keep him chained and cut off from the Force while they decide his fate. She can’t imagine him being anything else, and she knows too well how cornered beasts can lash out.

“Please, Ben,” she murmurs, swallowing down her nerves, “don’t.”

It’s more than a plea for him to stop talking.

 _Don’t do this,_ she beseeches with her eyes. _Not now. Not when this might be it—when after I leave this room I might never see you again. Don’t let it end like this._

And even though he’s afraid, and angry, and feels like she’s betrayed him, the utter exhaustion clinging to his limbs must win out. He sags, shoulders going limp, his head bowing as the tension seeps out of him.

“Is this it, then?”

Silence swells between them for a moment.

“Yeah,” Rey replies, “for now.”

Kylo snorts humourlessly. “For good, I think.”

“No,” her eyes blaze into his, her irises black in the cell’s purplish light. Her brows dip inwards at the centre, a stubborn frown notching creases into the bridge of her nose. Kylo stares at that little crease and feels his anger abate.

He wants to put his mouth there. He wants to put it everywhere she’ll let him.

“You’re not gonna die,” Rey tells him firmly. The look on her face brooks no argument.

“If you say so,” he takes a step back, not entirely trusting himself to be near her after that sudden spike of  _want_ in his lower belly (which he attributes to the fact that he’s never going to see her again after this conversation, and nothing else, because anything else would be  _dangerous)_.

There’s a simple bed in the corner of the room—which will  _probably_  hold him if he adopts the foetal position to sleep—and Kylo moves to sit on the edge now, looking up at Rey with tired eyes.

She steps closer again, her own features turning thoughtful. “I do say so,” she says. Her hands come to rest on his shoulders as she moves in between his legs.

Kylo stares up at her, his lips parting in surprise.

“Is this...” she falters, that little furrow appearing between her eyebrows again. She’s chewing at her lower lip and  _gods_ if he doesn’t want that to be him. “Is this okay?”

Slowly, keeping his mouth shut lest he stick his foot in it, Kylo nods.

 _Painfully_ slowly, he widens his knees a little further to give her more room, and lifts his left hand to cover her right.

Dimly aware that he was bitterly angry at her barely moments ago, he’s even more aware of how much he’d give to have her take those last few steps toward him now.

Rey inches closer, hesitantly, but there’s a growing surety in her eyes that makes him feel bolder in turn.

(Bold and  _in trouble.)_

This is different to anything they’ve done before, which admittedly isn’t much more than  _cuddle._ There have been a few looks (alright, more than a few, but this connection has no sense of timing or propriety and what are they  _supposed_ to do when it drops them into the other’s personal space at the worst possible moment? Over the years they’ve both grown adept at slamming their eyes shut the instant they feel it tugging at them), and more than once she’s woken in the middle of the night to find every damned  _inch_  of him pressed up against her like her own personal torment, but they’ve never crossed any real lines, not in the bond and not in person, because it’s not the kind of thing you can pull back from once you’ve gone there, not when you’re in each other’s minds, and there’s a tiny unspoken part of her that thinks maybe, just maybe, this is something she wants to happen when it’s  _real._

His other hand comes up to sit on her hip, his thumb lightly brushing over the spur of bone there and— _oh_. Rey blinks. That’s new.

(Well, not _new,_ but…different, when it’s _him_.)

Kylo misinterprets the sudden glazed look in her eyes. “Is  _this_  okay?” His hand lifts away slightly, and before she can think twice about it Rey plants her own over the top of it to keep it there.

“Yeah,” she says, her voice embarrassingly thin, “s’fine.”

“Okay,” his mouth twitches slightly. “Good.”

Rey swallows, determined to claw back some dignity even as Kylo resumes strumming his thumb gently over her hipbone in a concentrated attempt (made worse by the fact that he’s entirely  _oblivious_ to it) to turn her to mush.

“You’re not going to die,” she says again, looking between his dark eyes. “I promise.”

“It’s not up to you.”

“I don’t care.”

He smirks. “Then I’ll live, I guess.”

“Yes,” she eats up the last of the space between them, until if Kylo were to lean forward he could rest his head against her abdomen and she could wrap her arms around his shoulders without either of them bending an inch.

He cranes his neck to look up at her, even though standing she’s not much taller than him sitting, but Rey’s always gotten the vague impression that he  _likes_ being able to look up at her—that it makes some part of him feel _right_ —and it’s not like she’s going to complain any time soon.

“If—” he clears his throat, his hand tensing on her side. “If I live, would you do something for me?”

He can see on her face that she wants to argue the  _if,_ but the tone of his voice gives her pause.

“What?” she asks, curling her fingers into the edge of his collar and oh, isn’t  _that_ the perfect distraction—the perfect reason to think about anything other than what he must ask her, than the promise he has made and the promise he must exact from her now.

“I don’t know if—if they’ll give me back the Force,” he swallows down the bile that rises in his throat at the thought that it could ever have been  _taken_ from him, that they would  _presume_ , there was a time when he would’ve torn out the throat of anyone who dared such a thing and a more-than-significant part of him still wants to, but here he is, cowed and beaten, a prisoner till the day he dies and calmly planning for the eventuality that that’s not so far off. “Perhaps I’m to be severed from it forever. But—if I’m not, or if the bond lives on anyway, Rey...I need you to promise me something.”

Her eyes have narrowed at the mention of the bond. She knows, already, what it is he’s about to ask.

Maybe his mother spoke to her too.

Maybe she just knows his every microexpression by now, and can read him without words.

“Close the bond. Ignore it, when it connects us. Shut it out as best you can.”

“No,” she says simply.

“Rey—”

“I said  _no,_ ” her voice sharpens. “Ben, whatever happens, if you live, you’ll be  _alone.”_

“And so will you,” Kylo snaps. “The mad girl with the voices in her head, don’t you have enough things said about you without that too?”

Rey’s jaw clenches.  _“No.”_

He regards her for a long moment, and then his irritated expression turns slowly cold.

“What if I want you gone?” His gaze is hard on hers, though his voice is barely more than a murmur. “What if  _I_  want to be alone?”

She stiffens, lifting her hands from his shoulders and taking a step backward.

“I asked you for your help,” he continues, “and you agreed. You _promised,_ Rey. But here we are. I can’t do anything to change it, but maybe I don’t want you in my head anymore.”

“I _saved you,”_ hisses Rey, and _gods,_ she knows her eyes are shining, she can feel the tears gathering in their corners because his words sound a little too much like _I don’t want you anymore_ to do anything other than cut her to the quick.

“Yes,” his voice takes on a sneering edge. “You did. Were you expecting me to thank you?”

She flinches like he’s struck her, her hands curling into fists at her sides. She would wrap her arms around her middle to protect herself from his anger if she hadn’t learned as a girl never to show her belly to a predator, even one bigger and stronger and crueller than her. They’ve taken his claws away, but he still has venom. “No,” she whispers, “I expected you to hate me. To be unkind. I _know_ you’d rather have died--I know you still would, but I’m one of the two people in this galaxy who feels otherwise, and the _only_ person prepared to make sure you don’t die alone.”

He raises a scornful brow at her. “You would appear to be outvoted, then.”

 _Bastard._ “Do you, then?” she demands, “want to be alone? Do you want me to go now, and not come back? Do you want to go the rest of your life never speaking to anyone who isn’t out for your blood? I thought you were tired of that. Isn’t it why you ran?”

He goes still at that, something murderous flitting over his face. It isn’t the whole reason as to why he left the Order—why he skulked about the outer edges of the galaxy for nearly a year while the war dragged to its bitter end before she found him—but it’s one of them, and one she can wield against him.

(She’s never been afraid of being pettier than him, even if he does make it a _challenge_ sometimes.)

“Do you want this to be it?”

He shrugs, forcing himself to remain unmoved. “I want to be the only voice in my head, Rey.”

The way she looks down to hide the guilt clouding her features would probably make Kylo despise himself more than he already does, if such a thing weren’t _impossible,_ but he’d made a promise and he knows it to be the right one and so he leans forward, finding her eyeline again.

“You understand, don’t you?”

Rey nods hesitantly, her lip curling in displeasure. “Yes,” she whispers. “I—yes. Fine. I’ll do it.”

“Thank you.” Her consent makes him bold again: reaching out, he waits until she slips her hand into his (because even when she’s furious, even when _he’s_ furious, that they’re both as starved for a gentle touch as each other will always mean there’s a space for peace between them), and uses it to tug her gently back between his knees. This time he doesn’t resist the temptation to press his lips to her knuckles.

“Not forever,” he says into the soft skin of the back of her hand.

“No?”

“No. Just...some time.” He looks up at her, lets a tiny smirk steal across his face. “You never know, maybe they’ll shoot me tomorrow and this whole conversation will have been moot.”

Rey looks singularly unimpressed with the thought. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Maybe.” Reluctantly he lets her hand go, watches it fall back to her side even as he stores the memory of her warmth away for later.

(He must have lingered over every touch she’s ever given him, but this one might just have to last him the rest of his life.)

“You’re horrible at reassurance, then,” Rey informs him, and she’s smiling ever so slightly but he can see the sadness in her eyes. “Really, truly awful.”

“I’ve heard,” he admits. He can feel the new distance between them like a cold breeze down his spine. “You never fail to let me know my shortcomings.”

“Gives you something to work on—like, just, talking in general,” she tries to keep her voice light but it comes out soft and faintly wistful. Regret hits him hard and fast.

“It’s never been my strong suit,” he agrees. He rests his elbows on his thighs, interlinking his fingers between his knees to keep himself from reaching for her again.

“I noticed. Multiple times.”

 _“Alright,_ you’ve made your point.”

“Good. And—” Rey hesitates, biting her lip, “I am sorry. I know this isn’t what you wanted, any of it. It’s not really what I planned on happening either. I just—I didn’t know what else to do. You were bleeding so much, and…” she blinks back the memory, “all I could think of was to get you to Leia. Everything else was just…a mess. It still is, mostly.”

She still sees his blood on her hands, sometimes. Still dreams herself back in that place, watching him die, feeling the corner of her mind and heart he occupies go quiet.

Maybe it was selfish, to save him.

Maybe she doesn’t care.

She looks so lost, so _crestfallen_. The urge fills Kylo to do something— _anything_ —to chase that sorrow from her eyes, to coax something far sweeter to replace it. Rising to his feet, he takes a step towards her.

His hands twitch at his sides like they would reach out—like they would gather her to him and never let her go.

There’s a wild light in Rey’s eyes like she might just let him.

“Rey,” he mumbles, lifting one hand to brush his knuckles over her cheek.

Her throat moves as she swallows, her eyes fluttering closed.

_Rey, Rey, Rey…_

The sudden loud banging on the door makes them both jump, Kylo snatching his hand back like he’d touched something burning.

(There isn’t a part of him that doesn’t burn to touch her, and there isn’t a part of him he wouldn’t give to do it forever.)

“Time,” a voice barks. “Your ship’s cleared to leave, Madam Jedi.”

Rey’s face twists as she turns to glare daggers at the disembodied voice. “I hate it when they call me that. I’m not a kriffing Jedi. And why can’t they use my name?”

Kylo’s seething in the general direction of the door too, though for a very different reason.

Finally, their eyes find one another’s again.

“That felt like a goodbye,” Rey says softly.

“I didn’t want it to be.”

“Does it matter?” Her voice is small and tired and he  _hates_ that he can’t feel her, that there’s a wall between them even though they’re scarcely a foot apart; he hates the sorrow that’s made its home in her eyes but he’s never known how to ease it, never found the right words to make it disappear.

Most of all he hates that he’ll never see her again once she leaves this room, and in the few minutes he’s had with her he’s managed to make things more uncomfortable than ever.

“What?”

“What we want,” she looks down, her hand still curled in a fist at her side, the other playing with the hem of her shirt. “Does it matter?”

Drawing back a little, Kylo looks at her seriously. “What do you want?”

Rey chews on the inside her lip as she considers him, and the question.

 _Tell me,_ he thinks,  _please, I want to know._

“I don’t want you to die,” she says simply.

He nods. “Alright,” he says, and spurred on by a dead man’s courage Kylo leans in to rest his forehead against hers. “Then I’ll live.” 

 

**Ahch-To, now**

 

The  _Falcon_  drops out of the clear night sky, and Ben is attuned enough to the energy of the Force to determine who is on board—and who isn’t.

 

-

“She—my mother said Rey’s gone somewhere?”

Despite his resolve not to care, not to think of her if he can help it, it’s one of the first things out of his mouth when they’re done stowing the supplies away, and have settled in around the fire clutching mugs of whisky of uncertain provenance to fend off the night’s chill.

Chewie isn’t staying long: he doesn’t much like this planet, Ben gathers.

 _She’s been away a lot, lately,_ rumbles his uncle, making an amused sound in his throat.  _She said she has some new navigation system she wants to try out. She stays in touch, though, so I’m sure your mother will have let her know you made contact. She might be on her way here now._

Ben snorts. Not likely.

_What?_

“Nothing.”

Even with his gaze fixed resolutely on the fire, he can see Chewie turn to him out the corner of his eye.

“What?”

_You know what._

“I don’t, actually.”

The growl that leaves Chewie’s maw is faintly exasperated. _Pig-headed boy. Just like your father._

For the first time it doesn’t ache to hear his father spoken of, and Ben marvels anew at his uncle’s capacity for forgiveness. Life-debts don’t pass down generations: this is just…Chewie.

 _She was…distressed, to think you might expect her,_ he rumbles,  _that you had been alone for longer than the agreed term again. She would come back quiet, after the supply drops. It was like seeing you had—shaken her._ He hangs his head.  _At first we thought she wasn’t happy doing it, even though she’d argued for the right to, that she just wanted to spare anyone else the task, but then she spoke to your mother about how you were changing. Of how much closer to peace you seemed. How much happier. And how that made it worth it._

The fog is circling again, tugging at his awareness. His uncle’s voice echoes faintly.

“Made…what, worth it?” Ben asks, his tongue thick in his mouth.

 _She said—it seemed like you remembered less, and that one day, if she let you, you might forget it all—us all—completely_. He can’t remember a time he’s ever heard Chewie sound so forlorn.  _And she didn’t know what to do, but if it meant you found your peace, perhaps it wasn’t so bad. That was what she fought for, after all._

“What?” He’s missing something, something that would make sense of this mess she’s left for him to wade through.

(That’s what she’s done from the start, ever since they stumbled into each other: Rey of Jakku turning his world utterly on its head and gripping him with the blind conviction that if he only pushed through it he would get to the place where it all made sense. There would be clarity. Light. Truth. There’s a truth dancing just beyond the edge of where he can reach it, now: he can feel it the way one feels a breeze on the back of one’s neck, but there’s still something that doesn’t quite make  _sense_.)

“When did she fight?”

_…at your trial?_

Ben frowns. He can’t recall much of the weeks—months—he spent awaiting sentence, and never saw his trial in order to remember it. All he recalls of that time is the cell, and the dark-haired young woman with the unforgiving eyes, and the utter, echoing absence of the Force.

He wonders if it’s just yet more than he’s forgotten, or if anyone bothered to tell him in the first place.

 _Rey witnessed for you,_ Chewie says patiently.  _She spoke in your defence. She was the only one who did._

Ben doesn’t think he would have forgotten this.

_She told the tribunal who it was that killed Snoke, who it was that fought at her side to allow her to escape._

That isn’t entirely how Ben recalls that day, but then apparently his memory’s been all kinds of faulty lately—perhaps he can forgive himself for misremembering when the picture Rey’s testimony paints is so much kinder to both of them.

 _Then she fought for the terms of your sentence—for the right to visit you. The ones deciding your fate, they were content to leave you on a world where you could fend for yourself, but forbid all contact. You would be alone, forever. She made them back down on that._ There’s affectionate warmth in Chewie’s voice now. Rey is loved, it would seem.  _She reminded me of your mother, then. Fierce and bold._

The world shifts again. It’s starting to spin a little, the edges of his vision fraying as his eyes lose focus. He’s retreating inwards, to the quiet place, a reflexive action mirrored in the hunching of his shoulders and the clenching of his hands into fists around the mug.

He remembers, now, the way Rey reacted when they discovered the time difference—the horror in her eyes when it dawned on her how much longer he’d had to wait. The utter dismay, like  _she’d_  been the one condemned to solitude, to wait on the vague promise that someone would be back.

Ben goes cold. She had been, he thinks numbly. For fourteen years, that had been her life.

“It was her?”

_Yes. Her, and your mother. Not even the Republic could stand against them._

Oh.

He can’t feel his hands.

 _She’s been hurt, thinking that you might forget her, but if it brings you peace—was that not what we all fought for, in the end? Peace?_ Chewie growls mournfully.  _I disagreed. I did not think that girl deserves to lose anyone else she cares about._

 _Cares about,_ some hard-to-kill part of Ben scoffs silently, and it’s written on his face—because of course it is, he’s never been able to hide a thing and his uncle sees right through it.

 _Yes, daft pup,_ Chewie growls.  _You humans can hide nothing. She mourns you. Just because she has kept her promise to stay out of your bond does not mean she has stopped caring._

“I didn’t know you knew about that.”

 _The bond?_ Chewie huffs amusedly,  _she told me of it, in the beginning. How did you imagine she came to join you, on your big ship?_

“I…” truthfully, he hadn’t. There’d been other things on his mind that day, and all the days after.

_She told me of how it grew between you—and then how you agreed to sever it, while you were a prisoner. How you made her promise to stay out._

“Yes,” murmurs Ben, feeling something cold closing around his heart. “My mother thought it best.”

_For a time, maybe, but being alone in this place is bad for you, young one._

Ben shrugs, tossing the remains of his whisky in the flames.

The stuff he’s already drunk sits sour in his gut. his heart, his heart feels lighter than it has in years.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve felt worse.”

-

The bond is its usual helpful self after that, staying cold for so long that Ben begins to wonder if maybe Rey’s discovered how to shut it out for good. He prepares himself to wait months to hear from her again, if he ever does. If she chooses to return, and he’s still not so sure she will, he imagines she’d wait at least until the next supply drop.

In the end, though, it’s barely a fortnight after Chewie’s departure when the Force shimmers with the disturbance of her arrival in the world, and Ben emerges from the temple to see a ship gliding in towards Nimue on wings of sea-spray and sunshine.

The craft is small enough to land on the saddle at the island’s summit, so this is where they meet.

She emerges as he’s stomping over the hill toward her, sweeping her hair back into a careless knot to keep it out of the wind. She’s wearing loose leggings and a sweater that’s far too big for her, curls of hair already escaping to frame a face flushed pink by the bracing air, and Ben’s never seen anything more lovely in his life.

“How long?” she bursts out as soon as he’s within earshot, her eyes roving over him with something akin to desperation.

Ben shrugs. He hasn’t been counting. “Couple of weeks since Chewie left. It’s early spring.”

Rey’s entire frame slumps with relief. “Thank the stars, I—I would’ve come, last time. I said to Leia, but I—”

“I know. She told me.”

“Oh. Okay,” she’s still studying him, assessing him like he might explode on her at any moment. Ben takes in the colour in her cheeks, the bead of sweat on her hairline, the wild light in her eyes and the deep shadows beneath them, and the urge to say something biting about her stare fades almost as soon as it had risen.

“Wait,” she says abruptly. “Early spring. That was when my drop date was scheduled. Am I—” a slow grin creeps across her face. “Am I actually on time?”

Ben huffs a startled laugh. “I think you are.”

“Only took me two kriffing years.” She grimaces self-deprecatingly. “And you...are you okay?”

“I talked to Chewie,” it bursts out of him before he can stop it. It's not what he'd meant to say but he needs to know—he _needs_ to hear it from her; the truth, with nothing held back. “He said…you were at my trial.”

Rey frowns, thrown by the sudden shift in topic. The trial was years ago, now. A distant memory. “Yeah?”

“He said you spoke in my defence.”

“…so?”

Ben releases the breath he’d been holding. “He said you were the only one who did.”

Rey's bafflement only intensifies. Had he not known that?

Hadn’t they told him  _anything?_

“Rey.”

“What?” she says, just a little snippily, even though it's on _his_ behalf that she's suddenly prickling with irritation. Rey draws a deep breath, pushing it aside.

“Why?”

“Why, what?”

“You know what.”

“Because—” she scrambles for an explanation she’d never thought she would have to give. She’d thought he’d _known_. “Leia—”

“Rey.”

_“What?”_

“Please,” his voice is so soft and _gods,_ the way he says  _please_ threatens to shatter her now, just as it did then, only this time she has no defence against it: there’s no war, no rebellions, nothing to hide behind, no more walls to throw up and  _orders_  to call her away—except for the fact that she must leave him, sooner or later, and that should be enough, shouldn’t it? It should be enough to give her something to hide behind, the fact that in days she’ll have to say goodbye.

So why isn’t it?

“Tell me the truth.”

Her mouth becomes a thin line. The truth. She owes him that, doesn’t she?

She’s not quite brave enough to spell it out for him.

“Don’t you know?” she whispers. “Haven’t you always known?”

“I want,” Ben says simply, “that isn’t the same thing.”

Rey’s heart gives a squeeze and _oh,_ it’s not so different though.

“Why do you think I’ll tell you the truth?” she challenges him, more to give herself some breathing space from his admission than anything. “I would’ve let you forget.”

He looks startled at that. He’d all but forgotten what Chewie said about her quandary, in the wake of what came after.

Softly, he says, “but you didn’t.”

(He wants so very much to hear her say the words.)

Rey grits her teeth. “Because I’m selfish.”

Whatever he expects to hear, it isn’t  _this._

“What?” He moves closer, bewildered. “Selfish?”

“Yes,” she says hoarsely, and her eyes are shining now, “I saw you finding peace here and I thought,  _I can’t take that away from him, it would only be cruel to make him remember…_ and I was going to, anyway. I was going to do it, to make you remember everything, just so you wouldn’t forget _me_. Just because I was afraid to come back here and hear you ask who I was. How is that  _not_ selfish?”

“Because,” Ben murmurs, moving closer still and grinning with relief when she lets him do it. Raising one hand, he brushes his fingers along the soft line of her jaw, a slow burn of delight igniting in his chest when she allows _this_ too—when she  _lets_ him take a mile for every inch and leans into the faint warmth of his touch like it’s something she welcomes _,_  “I don’t want to forget.”

“No?”

“No. Never.”

“Still,” Rey mutters, determined to castigate herself for the fact that she has a heart in her chest and sometimes it dares to make her want things. “I thought about it, before I spoke to Leia.”

 _“Stop,”_ and now Ben’s nearly  _laughing_ because does she really want him to be angry with her this much? To hate her for the choice she made and the choice she didn’t make, when all  _he_ wants is to kiss that sullen turn from her lips and remind himself of the warmth of her skin? “Rey, stop.”

The laughter in his voice seems to rub her the wrong way. “I’m glad you find it funny,” she crosses her arms across her chest, glowering up at him—but he can see the corner of her mouth twitching despite herself, and it encourages him to lean in just a little more. “Couldn’t let you become a wild island man, anyway,” she says, “not when you promised to help me translate the Jedi books.”

Ben frowns. “Did I? I don’t remember that.”

Her smile grows full and gains a wicked edge. It melts him, just a little.

“Oh. Hilarious.”

Rey snickers. “I know.” Mirroring the hand that still rests on her cheek, she lifts her own to cradle his jaw and slides it up into his hair. Ben’s eyes close under her touch, a low sound of contentment slipping from him when she digs her fingers in. “I have done a little of it, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Be faster with two of us, though.” She’s closer, now, he can hear it—can feel it in the rush of her breath over his jaw, and he wants to open his eyes and count the freckles on her cheeks the way he used to do, sometimes, when the bond pulled them together; when she was sleeping and he was  _trying_ to find rest but the sight of her beside him was so much more arresting than the insides of his own eyelids would ever be. More than that, though, he wants to keep this delicious anticipation building in his chest, the  _hope_ that crests and crests inside him until it feels like he’s going to  _burst_ until finally, with a sweet sigh and the slightest shuffle of her feet, Rey lifts up to close the distance between them and—

—touches the tip of her nose to his, nudging it gently.

Ben’s eyes open to find hers dancing with humour scarcely inches away from him.

“Don’t fall asleep on me now, you big lump,” she chides, her nose still rubbing his, a grin playing over her lips that informs him she knows  _exactly_ what she’s doing.

Oh, for all her protestations this girl is going to be the absolute  _death_ of him.

“Menace,” he mutters, reaching to cup her face with his other hand so he can pull her in and kiss her properly.

Rey meets him without protest, a soft exhalation of surprise slipping from her lips when one hand moves to cradle the back of her head and tug her close to deepen the kiss, pouring into it everything he feels and can’t say—might never have had the  _chance_ to say, but here on this little blue world out of time Ben can be as honest as he ever has, and maybe she won’t understand the true depth of feeling behind the kiss just yet but she can feel the  _hunger_ of his lips against hers, and the way she rises to match him is enough to stay the beast in his chest that want nothing more than to devour her whole.

He kisses her until he’s chased that mischievous smile off her face, until they’re both breathless, the flex of her fingers into his shoulder muscles sending delicious spikes of warmth right through him all the while, and when Rey eventually pulls away her mouth is the most perfect shade of pink he’s ever seen. She licks her lips and studies his face as her hand comes to settle at his jaw again, her thumb curving to trace over the full swell of his bottom lip.

Ben gently tips her chin up to look at him. “Let me say it now, and I’ll tell you every day if I have to: I don’t want to forget you.” He closes the distance between them again, and a  _thrill_ goes through him when her eyes fall closed in anticipation of the kiss. “I  _never_  want to forget you.”

She's slow to open them again when their lips part, but her smile is quick to reappear. “What makes you think I’ll be around every day?”

Ben leans in once more to brush a kiss over her brow. “Hmm, just a feeling,” he says, and pulls back again to watch in delight the way her cheeks flush rosy.

“Been having a lot of  _feelings_ , have you?” Rey tilts her face up to nudge her nose against his chin.

“Increasingly.”

“Seems presumptuous of you, to think I’d hang around,” her voice fills his heart with light, makes him lower his hand to rest at her hip and tug her just a little closer. “I’m not sure I’d be welcome to stay much longer, though. Alcida-Auka doesn’t like me, remember?”

“I’ll talk her round. She’s taken quite a shine to me.”

“Oh, really?”

“Really.”

“Well, I might just have a proposition for her, in that case.”

Ben blinks. “For her?”

“Yeah.” Rey steps back again, just far enough to be out of kissing range—hugely unfair of her, he thinks, but easily remedied. “You listening?”

The look on his face makes it plain what he’d rather be doing. “Grudgingly.”

“Good. Remember what I was saying, last time, about…making a place, for people like us?”

His heart leaps at the way she phrases it even as his stomach twists at the direction he knows this is going.

“…yeah…”

She pulls her lip between her teeth again, chewing on it uncertainly. “I was thinking about doing something, maybe, for a few months out of the year—like a school, only not so _formal,_ stars know I’m not qualified to teach anything beyond stripping engine parts, but between us I’m sure we could—”

“Wait,” Ben can’t quite wrap his head around her words, “‘we’?”

Rey tilts her head curiously. “Why not?”

She can’t be serious, can she?

“I can think of a _few_ reasons.”

She rolls her eyes. “Oh, well, sure, but you didn’t think I was just going to leave you to draw pictures and play with wooden swords for the rest of your life, did you?”

“I…” didn’t he?

“Ben, the only thing I’ve learned more from than you in my life is a flight simulator. Why _not?”_

“I’m not sure the Republic would approve. Or your Force-users…” _or their families, or...literally anyone who hears this idea._

“I’m not sure I care much what the Republic thinks. And as for the Force-sensitives—if they don’t want to, no one’s going to make them. I can go wherever I want. But—you can’t, and your brain might be useful. You’ve got the training, after all.”

“Yes…” she’s not wrong, even if she has apparently lost her _entire mind_ since he last saw her. “But—”

Rey looks at him flatly. “But, are you trying to tell me you’d actually prefer to spend the rest of your life drawing pictures and playing with wooden swords? Or have you a better offer?”

Truthfully, he’s not entirely sure what her offer entails—beyond _risk,_ and _people,_ and the potential for unpleasantness—but when put like that, Ben realises that no, he has no better alternatives, and he likely never will.

“I’m not saying yes,” he hedges, because the idea of people after so long with no one or just _Rey_ is a lot, but that slow familiar smile begins to curve across her mouth and he knows he’s already lost this fight, just like every other fight, and just like every other fight he can’t find it in himself to mind.

“Well, maybe I will hang around for a little while, then,” Rey’s arms come up to twine around Ben’s neck as he settles his own at her waist, pulling her close so he can rest his forehead against hers.

It might be his favourite place, he thinks, the space between them when they stand like this.

“Stay,” he breathes, gazing down into her bright eyes, glittering now with humour rather than tears.

Rey nods, “long as you want.”

Ben snorts. “Don’t say that, I might not let you leave.”

“What d’you mean  _let me,_ I’m the one with the ship—” her protest dissolves into laughter as he dips down to press his lips against hers again, a clumsy kiss impeded by the angle of their noses, made so much the sweeter when Rey eases up onto her toes slightly to find a better fit.

She kisses him eagerly, and he wants nothing more than to spend the rest of the day trying to keep up.

When she pulls away to rain little kisses along his jaw, Ben can't hold back a  _groan._

"Alright, now I'm  _never_  letting you leave."

Rey crooks an eyebrow, a sly smirk on her lips. "Because that worked _so_ well for you last time."

He's still gaping at her when she swoops in to kiss him again, her mouth moving over his like she has no intention of ever letting him breathe again.

(He has no intention of dissuading her.)

She gives a muffled shriek when Ben hoists her up into his arms, grinning against her lips as he tilts back a little to keep her balanced. Finally, _reluctantly,_ they part for breath.

Rey’s fingers busy themselves with the soft hair at the nape of his neck, tugging on it in the way she _knows_ will get a reaction. Ben groans, pressing his face into the curve of her throat as though he could hide there.

“So what now?” she asks.

He doesn’t know. He hadn’t really thought beyond the next few moments, which he hopes very much will be spent engaged in more kissing.

Pulling back a little, he looks up at her. “What do you want?”

Rey’s tongue flicks out over her lower lip as her gaze darts between his eyes.

“I want to live,” she says.

“Alright,” Ben shrugs, leaning in to kiss her again, “then I guess we’ll live.”

**Author's Note:**

> Has a [fanmix](https://playmoss.com/en/erlkings/playlist/a-promise-of-grace-under-silver-grey-skies)
> 
> [Alcida-Auka, the myth, the legend](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Alcida-Auka)
> 
> The names of Ahch-To's islands, moon and suns are borrowed from the [Mabinogi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianrhod) or the Vita Merlini [[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Lake#Nimue)] [[2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Lake#In_medieval_literature)] [[3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_le_Fay#Early_appearances)] 
> 
> ['Budo and the Art of Japanese Calligraphy'](http://www.smaa-hq.com/articles.php?articleid=3)
> 
>  
> 
> Big love to the mods, who've worked their asses off in this exchange <3


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